The Iraq war ten years on

As we draw our Iraq debate to a close, thoughts from Alison Broinowski on Michael Green's two-parter below. But first, Jeni Whalan writes:

What did I take from John Howard's recent speech to the Lowy Institute? A profound sense of unease that there exists within Australian foreign policymaking a misguided assumption about actions taken under the rubric of the US alliance. Specifically, I'm concerned about a tacit implication that when alliance considerations motivate Australia's decisions, its policymakers need not be (too) concerned with outcomes beyond the strength of our US relationship and the welfare of our troops.

As a retrospective on Iraq, the speech conspicuously avoided the war's profound consequences for local, regional and global order. Instead, it focused on the circumstances and thinking that led to the 2003 decision. Mr Howard presented a sound case for invoking the ANZUS Treaty, painting a compelling picture of a wounded superpower perceiving itself suddenly vulnerable in a new, dangerous world. While the prudence of that threat perception is debatable, I'm satisfied enough with Mr Howard's argument that we should understand Australia's decision in its context.

But surely that ought to be a mere starting point for serious reflection on its effects — for Iraq and its people, Iraq's neighbours and the wider Middle East, the US, the willing coalition, the United Nations, the non-proliferation regime, democracy promotion, nation- and state-building...and, yes, Australia.

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Yet this was a strange retrospective, one that drew little benefit from a decade's hindsight. A tentative (and tenuous) connection to the Arab Spring notwithstanding, the speech left hanging the most important questions for Australian foreign policy and its architects.

Can the decision, which seemed so right to the Australian leadership at the time, be justified in light of the war's course and consequences? By what measure did the Howard Government expect to evaluate its role in the Iraq war? What kind of future Iraq did it imagine would exist in 2013 — and if there was no such image, why not?

Rodger Shanahan rightly rejects the notion that Australia can shirk all responsibility for the failures of post-invasion planning. Likewise, we should reject wholesale the idea that, having determined to join a war of such international significance, Australia can be satisfied with parochial evaluation.

One wonders whether any outcome in Iraq could have rendered the 2003 decision worthy of review in Mr Howard's eyes. I don't doubt that the Australian leadership considered joining the war effort to be right at the time, based on judicious analysis of the national interest; to suggest the reverse is absurd. But we should now expect the current and former national security community to review the assumptions of that decision in light of events that followed.

In his address, Mr Howard laid claim to a legacy of leadership in the nation's interest – 'it was not a poll-driven decision' – but neglected its final test: to review with equal confidence and equivalent depth that decision's consequences.

Alison Broinowski:

Although no equal event is to be held at Lowy to match John Howard's speech on 9 April, at least here in The Interpreter we have an opportunity for debate. But after reading Michael Green's first contribution and listening to Mr Howard I am left wondering whether the rest of us inhabit a different planet. 'Straight talk' is exactly what we don't get from either of them, and didn't get from the Prime Minister before, during, or after the invasion of Iraq. What we are getting is their rewrite of history.

They want us to believe that all governments, 'virtually every' intelligence agency, and many academics believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD. Those who did fell for the lies that emanated from the Bush Administration. How was it that so many outside these whispering galleries knew dodgy data when we saw it and indeed wrote about it before, during, and after the invasion, using publicly available reports? (Paul Barratt, Tony Kevin, Andrew Wilkie and I were among the Australians who did). Because we listened to non-gallery inhabitants Hans Blix, the late Dr David Kelly, Saddam's renegade son, and even Saddam himself, when he finally – too late – admitted he had long since destroyed his WMD. Many others inside and outside government in the UK and US did the same. Lawyers and diplomats in all three countries protested, individually and in groups, and of course were ignored by heads of government who were bent on war.

How was it that we knew their claims that the war was legal were false? The public had only to hear Sir Jeremy Greenstock and John Negroponte, UK and US Ambassadors on the Security Council, say repeatedly that another resolution was needed, beyond 1441, to legitimise an invasion. Kofi Annan, as Secretary-General, said on 18 March (the day Australian special forces went into Iraq, ahead of the deadline, as Tony Kevin has shown) that without Security Council approval, the invasion would be illegal in the view of the UN. For Mr Howard now to claim that China would have been on-side if only the recalcitrant French and Russians had agreed to the invasion is like saying we'd have won the Davis Cup if only we'd won more rubbers.

The war made Bush more popular in the US, says Dr Green, who was an adviser in the Bush White House, so he would know. But he doesn't once mention, nor did Mr Howard, the devastating impact on American self-esteem and the US reputation internationally of the second attack on Fallujah, the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, the long injustice of Camp X-Ray, and the massacre of civilians by helicopter revealed to the world by WikiLeaks. As for Australian opinion, that was democratically expressed when Howard lost the 2007 election and his seat, having managed to win a khaki election in 2004. Even the way Mr Howard on 9 April wryly described the end of his political career was self-serving: 'office left me'.

In his second piece, Dr Green gives credit to Mr Howard for not saying no to Washington. That much is true. The rest is not: without citing any evidence, he claims that the US-Australia alliance emerged stronger from Iraq, that under Howard relations with China improved, and that opinion about Iraq remains divided. Taking these one by one:

• The alliance has in fact been weakened by America's overstretch, to the point where Obama in his recent National Security statement admitted that the US cannot become involved in protracted wars anywhere. Allies should be in no doubt about the reliance they can place on receiving American protection against an enemy.
• Under Howard, of course, Australia's trade with China grew, as it did under his predecessors and successors. But Howard's Australia was advised by the official Chinese media (People's Daily, 13 March 2000) to stay out of Chinese affairs, to adopt a lower profile, and mend its relations with the PRC. Australia, with its American ally and its China-fuelled economy, displayed 'confusion, ambivalence, or contradiction'. Chinese leaders said similar things to Stephen Smith only last year.
• Naturally, no opinion about any war is unanimous. If Dr Green has examined the views for and against the Iraq invasion in coalition countries, in other countries, and in Iraq, and has found a majority supports it, he should surprise the world by revealing the figures.

The most alarming of Mr Howard's answers to questions at the Lowy Institute on 9 April was when he left open the possibility of another war, in Iran. Are we again in the count-down period, with the distant drumbeats sounding? Will Australians again be told lies about the necessity and legality of war, and be sent to kill and die in a country that is no enemy of ours? Will another Australian Prime Minister succumb to the blandishments of such people as Dr Green, and say yes when Washington again cries wolf?

I'm in the Middle East doing research for a forthcoming paper on Syria that I'm writing with my colleague Anthony Bubalo. My early impression is that there appears to be a complete absence of rational (let alone unified) policy views about what anybody wants or believes will be the case 'the day after' Assad. 

Such is the degree of policy paralysis and fear of chaos that, in a recent Turkish television interview, Assad put himself forward as the only hope for stability, while in yesterday's Washington Post, Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki observed that 'We have been mystified by what appears to be the widespread belief in the United States that any outcome in Syria that removes President Bashar al-Assad from power will be better than the status quo.'

I will blog more on the Syria issue but, with Western states so cautious to become embroiled in the complexity of Syria, I read John Howard's speech on Iraq with interest. I was struck by the absence of attention in both the speech and the Q&A on how Mr Howard thought Iraq would turn out politically following the invasion.

Australia claims to be a close and strong US ally, and John Howard rightly laid blame at the feet of the US for poor (read virtually non-existent) post-invasion planning and execution. But Australia had lots of planning staff assisting the coalition and would obviously have been privy to the complete lack of Phase 4 (post-invasion) planning.

As one of the few countries contributing forces to the invasion, Australia should have been vitally interested in how the US was going to run the country we had helped invade. If we thought US planning was bizarrely optimistic and took no account of the complexity of Iraqi society and the regional sectarian and political dynamics, why didn't we say so? Or did we not concern ourselves with these things because we were just there to fly the flag, didn't know the region and didn't really care about the future of the country we were invading? [fold]

I get the sense that Australia's political leadership of the time is content to admit that everyone got the intelligence wrong, praise the ADF and then criticise the US for getting the occupation wrong. But you can't on the one hand criticise the US for ignoring the nature of the country it was set to invade without accepting criticism yourself for failing to look at the consequences of Australia's actions. 

If I was at the speech, I would have asked John Howard how he believed Iraq's sects and tribes and regional states would react to the invasion, how much attention he paid to post-invasion planning and, if he thought it wanting, whether he raised his concerns with George W Bush. I hope we didn't accept a lift in the US car without giving any thought to where we were driving, or whether the driver even knew where he was going.

Photo by Flickr user Marc Veraart.

Michael Green served on the US National Security Council staff from 2001-2005 and is now Senior Vice President for Asia at CSIS and a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute. Part 1 of this post here.

In his Lowy Institute speech marking the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, John Howard rejects the assertion that Australia should have said 'no' in order to demonstrate Canberra's independence from Washington. Having served in the White House at the time, I have no doubt that a 'no' from Canberra would have done enormous political damage to both George W Bush and Tony Blair. 

In 1954 the Eisenhower Administration was desperate to get Australian forces to join a US intervention in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dienbienphu. The British had already refused and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thought Australian participation alone would be enough to convince a divided US Congress to support the deployments. The Menzies Government eventually opted out and as a result Ike called off the Joint Chiefs' planning for a US-led military campaign against the Vietminh. 

I have wondered about that historical parallel, but have to conclude after reflecting on Howard's nuanced account that an Australian defection from the coalition in 2003 would not have deterred Bush or Blair. Koizumi, always principled and stubborn, would also have stayed the course in Japan. As Howard pointed out, the Bush Administration and large majorities in the Congress saw a clear and present danger and were determined to act.

And what would Australia have achieved by leaving the coalition? The damage to American leadership globally and especially in the Asia Pacific region would have been considerable. Would Australian relations with China or Indonesia have improved in any measurable way as a result? It is hard to see how. Former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama made a great drama of distancing Japan from the US in 2009 and Beijing repaid his government by bullying Japan in the East China Sea and cutting off rare earth metal exports to teach Tokyo a lesson in coercion. Under John Howard, Australia's relations with China improved considerably. 

Beijing respects power. Strong alliances, as Clausewitz taught, are one of the greatest sources of national power. Under any metric – public opinion, interoperability or military effectiveness — the US-Australia alliance emerged from Iraq stronger. [fold]

Yet Iraq obviously did have major consequences. The faulty logic of the 'transformation in military affairs', inadequate ground forces for post-conflict stabilisation, and amateur post-war planning at the Pentagon all caused unnecessary casualties and showed American vulnerability when the intention was to show strength and resolve.

Before that vulnerability and incompetence became clear, American diplomacy was highly effective. Immediately after the fall of Saddam, Libya abandoned its WMD and missile programs and the US National Intelligence Council argued that Iran appeared to temporarily abandon its own nuclear weapons ambitions. 

It was also clear to me in negotiations with China and North Korea in the spring of 2003 that the US brought increased leverage into negotiations on North Korea's nuclear weapons program. A year later the Chinese and North Koreans appeared considerably less worried about American coercive power as US forces became bogged down in Iraq. The Six-Party Talks with North Korea drifted. Howard acknowledges the serious failings in the stabilisation phase of operations in Iraq – the fault of America and not Australia – and rightly praises President Bush for going against the grain of public opinion and his own cabinet by correcting the situation through the 'surge' in 2007.

Howard also acknowledges and appears to regret that the war polarised Australian politics. In the US the war opened an old fissure in the Republican Party, which today engages in damaging debates between neo-isolationists like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and robust internationalists like John McCain (I am 100% with McCain, it will come as no surprise).

Since the war, American strategic culture has lurched in the direction of risk-avoidance and 'leading from behind', placing us in untenable positions in Syria and possibly Iran. The Obama foreign policy doctrine, such as it is, has been framed almost entirely around the Democratic Party's interpretation of Iraq. Even the 'pivot' to Asia — a success for the President on the whole — was framed domestically in the US in terms of getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq distorted the American strategic debate, though we will recover.

The personal toll of the war on thousands of Americans — and as Howard emphasises, many Australians as well – cannot be fully calculated. Traveling across the US, one is continually struck by the painful sight of young men and women bearing the tattooed names of their lost husbands, brothers or platoon members. At every Washington Nationals baseball game the crowd rises to acknowledge the wounded warriors from area military hospitals who sit in the honoured seats behind home plate. Unlike Vietnam, this is not a left-right issue in American politics. Respect for the American military is high, as it should be.

Was the US right to go into Iraq? Was Australia right to join? There is no doubt that the US should have planned and executed post-conflict operations very differently. If we had, I suspect opinion today would on balance be supportive of the war, though that is unprovable. Alternately, non-action would have left Saddam in a dangerous position and American opinion today might very well have been highly critical of the Bush Administration for not acting on bipartisan recommendations from the Congress to remove him at the time. 

As it is, opinion will be divided for some years to come. In the 1920s, Gallup polling in the US showed that a significant majority of Americans thought it had been a mistake to intervene in the Great War. By the late 1930s, as the storm clouds gathered in Europe and the Pacific, the polling suddenly reversed and a large majority of Americans began saying that the US had been right to fight the Hun. In the 1950s, many Americans considered the Korean War a defeat. Today only a handful of academics on the left argue that it was a mistake to defend South Korea against Kim Il Sung. 

History will render multiple and changing judgments about the Iraq War. John Howard has rendered his and it is authoritative and compelling. It will certainly not be the last.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Below, Mona Scheuermann responds to Michael Ware. But first, Ashley Murtha:

Some important qualifications should be made regarding Sam Roggeveen's mention of Canada as a country that opposed the Iraq War, ostensibly referenced as it is a middle-power that enjoys close relations with the US and thus may offer some insight of how the US would have received a hypothetical refusal of support from Australia.

Canada is linked with the US geographically, economically, and culturally to such an extent that it underscores a 'familial' relationship between the two transcending the vagaries of ordinary diplomacy — akin to relations between Australia and New Zealand. Geopolitically, Canada's US security umbrella is guaranteed by the fact that the US would never accept a foreign power projecting military force upon the continent of North America, regardless of any political animosity that may arise between Canada and the US themselves. Therefore Canada is in a unique position to take such liberties in its relationship with the US without fear of compromising its military security, a luxury that Australia cannot afford.

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On the other hand, the animosity between the US and 'Old Europe' doesn't provide a telling picture of how a hypothetical Australian refusal of support would have been received either, as the symbolic importance of France and Germany's refusal to back the war exaggerated the diplomatic fallout. Rather, the US would have have likely reacted to an Australian protest with indifference, which is precisely what we are afraid of in the event we need to call on them for military assistance.

Mona Scheuermann:

I was in Japan on the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, still arguing with myself about whether, having watched Tiananmen Square in real time and sworn that I never would set foot in China, I should give up my principles and, so many years later, go. And then I had an epiphany; how could I hold onto this moral high ground: how many more  people had we killed in Iraq, and how much horror had we inflicted? And I do feel guilt, for at the very beginning, for a very short time, I was convinced about the argument to push in.

Of course Michael Ware's analysis is correct. We should not have started the whole mess, but to do it without any game plan, any knowledge of the society? There are times when the word 'obscenity' is not even nearly adequate. But I can give him words (not that he ever needs someone else's) for what he points out here and in other places about the war and the warriors and those who send and discard the victims.

Having described a gas attack, Wilfred Owen ends 'Dulce et Decorum Est' with these stanzas:

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He [the friend who had not managed his gas mask in time] plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes wilting in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori. (It is sweet and fitting to die for your country);

Or, to quote Bush jr: 'Mission Accomplished'.

Michael Green served on the US National Security Council staff from 2001-2005 and is now Senior Vice President for Asia at CSIS and a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute.

Kudos to former Prime Minister John Howard for giving a straight assessment of the Iraq War on the 10th anniversary of the conflict. Howard said he would not 'do a McNamara' (a mea culpa like that of the spiritually broken American Secretary of Defense after Vietnam), but neither did he shy away from the tough issues.

Howard hits on the key point that most critics ignore or forget: the ALP, the Democratic Party leadership in the US, and virtually every intelligence agency in the world was convinced Saddam Hussein had WMD. 

One point Howard did not mention was that even Saddam's own corps commanders thought he had WMD. Early in Operation Iraqi Freedom, US signals intelligence picked up senior Iraqi officers pleading with Baghdad to release the WMD so that they could be used against coalition forces. In interviews after the war, some of Saddam's inner circle confessed that they maintained the Potemkin village of a weapons program in order to deter the Iranians and sustain the loyalty of their own military.

It was chilling to know that senior Iraqi officers thought Saddam would use WMD against coalition forces, though not surprising since the Iraqi Army had used them against the Kurds before. Unfortunately, the intelligence dossier on Iraq's WMD programs was built in part on the belief among Saddam's own generals that they had access to such weapons.

Howard also notes that the dire predictions of damage to Australia's relations with Indonesia from participation in the war were wrong. I remember traveling to Canberra in 2003 ahead of President Bush and hearing an almost unanimous view at a roundtable of academics on this point. Yet under the Howard Government, Australia forged an excellent relationship with President Yudhoyono. US and Australian counter-terrorism cooperation with Jakarta actually increased after Iraq, breaking the back of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist cells that threatened Australians, Indonesians and Americans. [fold]

In similar ways, academics in the US made (and continue erroneously to make) the claim that the Iraq War damaged American relations with Asia. In fact, public opinion polls taken in Japan, Korea, India, China, and Indonesia all indicate that the US was more popular in those countries at the end of the Bush Administration than at the end of the Clinton Administration. 

In a 2008 survey on soft power in Asia conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a majority of respondents in the region argued that US influence in Asia had increased over the previous decade. The only place in the Chicago Council survey where a majority of respondents argued American influence in Asia had decreased was in the US itself. No surprise there, since American critics of the Iraq War in academia and journalism have been erroneously projecting their own views of the war onto analysis of Asia since 2003.

Howard also rejected the idea of saying 'no' to Washington on the Iraq war. That's the subject of part II of this analysis.

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

The text of John Howard's Iraq ten-year retrospective, delivered to a packed Lowy Institute audience this evening, is on our website. My first impressions are below. I hope others will provide a more sympathetic reading, because despite Howard's assured delivery and measured arguments, I found nothing that convinced me:

• It's hard to overstate the emphasis Howard placed on the importance of US psychology in justifying the Iraq war. He stressed repeatedly in his speech and in the Q&A that America's decision to invade Iraq cannot be understood without grasping what he called the 'shadow of 11 September' and the 'profound vulnerability' felt by Americans after the event. Americans felt 'unnerved' and 'dumbfounded', and this was 'central' to understanding the Iraq war.
  • Such sentiments seem exaggerated today, Howard said, but he was in Washington on September 11 and he recognised it as quite real.
• Howard was challenged on this point by a question from the floor, which argued that it is the responsibility of leaders not to stoke such fears but to calm them. Howard responded that in fact such fears were well placed.
• This strikes me as the real nub of the debate about the Iraq war: a difference in threat perception. Bush, Howard, Blair et al argue the threat was important enough to warrant preventive military action. I would argue that even if the assessments about Iraq's WMD capacities had turned out to be real, we could have lived with this threat just as we do with Iran and North Korea.
  • The fears Americans expressed after 9/11 were in fact vastly inflated; al Qaeda was never an 'existential threat', and political leaders should have sent a message of reassurance to their publics that the threat was serious but containable if we committed ourselves to defeating al Qaeda in Afghanistan and to expanded worldwide counter-terrorist intelligence and policing efforts.

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• Howard's other big justification for the war was that the status quo — containment through sanctions and the no-fly zones — was eroding and unsustainable. 
  • I think Howard has a point here, and some blame must be placed on the French, Germans and Russians, so implacably opposed to Bush's course, for not putting any 'skin in the game' by offering an alternative. They might, as Michael Walzer argued at the time, have avoided Bush's 'big war' by offering a 'small war', a much reinforced sanctions regime and a no-fly zone over the entire country that would have involved their forces.
  • Howard also said that, in the context of America's sense of post-9/11 vulnerability, a continuation of containment would have seemed to the US public as 'oddly passive'. Walzer's proposal would have gotten around that problem.
• Interesting to hear Howard expound on the Australian political process at the time. My impression was that Howard decided essentially alone on Australia's course, but:
  • Howard said Australia's involvement in the war was debated exhaustively in the National Security Committee of Cabinet, at which senior officials from various parts of the national security bureaucracy were present.
  • He also took the decision to a full cabinet meeting and asked each cabinet member for their vote.
• Howard said Australia needed to be a '100%' ally at the time of the Iraq war, not '70% or 80%'.
  • This raises the question of why we didn't send more forces to Iraq, and why we pulled them out so quickly after the invasion. Was supporting the occupation not part of being a '100% ally'?
  • And what harm was done to countries such as Canada, which opposed the US invasion? Have its relations with the US suffered to this day?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Michael Ware was a war correspondent for TIME Magazine and CNN. He spent six years in Iraq.

fantasy – (noun) the faculty or activity of imagining things, esp things that are impossible or improbable. 

A few of Kipling's words keep peeling like church bells in my head as I finally sit and ponder Derek Woolner's response to my Iraq war tenth anniversary piece:

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools 

Please understand I don't mean disrespect to Woolner. But his perspective on the insurgency is heinously flawed and, much like America's war leaders were, perversely dismissive of reports from the ground.

That said, I do agree wholeheartedly when Woolner says 'the early decisions of America's political leaders fundamentally weakened the post-invasion environment.' I cannot see many disputing that position. But it's when I feel he almost contradicts himself a paragraph later that I gagged. I find extraordinary his assertion that 'the US quickly became incapable of influencing the course of events.'

That thought flies directly in the face of something I heard so often from American battle commanders that it was akin to a self-evident truth: 'The enemy always gets a vote.' Sunni insurgents, militia leaders, even separatist Kurds (whose peshmerga I feel strongly bonded to after two months in their pre-invasion trenches) were able to affect, in large and small ways, the battlespace we had in Iraq. But for the corollary to be that, of all the actors in the conflict, it is the Americans – with over 100,000 troops, unchallenged air supremacy, and the most formidable weapons systems on the planet – who could not influence events simply doesn't gel.

Allow me to quickly indicate some further erroneous statements: [fold]

• Woolner asserts that 'Sunni insurgents had destroyed the UN headquarters in Baghdad'. Perhaps we differ on semantics alone, but insurgents had nothing to do with the UN bombing (inside the security perimeter, I witnessed the moment rescuers realised UN chief Sergio Vieira de Mello, a man I knew from Timor, had died of his wounds while still trapped). Rather than insurgents, it was actually the work of Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid wal Jihad, later called Al Qaeda in Iraq, an organisation I would designate as ultra-militant Islamist in intent and terrorist in method. In the end this distinction between insurgent and terrorist would prove to be key to ending to the Sunni fight against the occupiers. So I don't think it's a small point.
• 'The Bush Administration...and their allies believed, almost with a passion, that the secularism of Saddam's Ba'ath Party would continue to guide Iraqi politics...' I'm not too sure about that one either. Yes, war planners had been deluded into thinking there was a secular democrat waiting to get out of every Iraqi. But to think it was a Ba'ath tradition of secularism strikes me as odd, particularly given, from the day I saw him arrive back in Iraq prior to the invasion, false US ally Ahmed Chalabi was pushing for de-Baathification by having a paper on the subject widely circulated among the press corps, a policy soon after enacted by proconsul Paul Bremer to disastrous effect.
• 'Contrary to Ware's illustration of the power of the Sunni insurgency, it instead demonstrated its irrelevance, for the UIA and KA again won control in the December 2005 elections, with al Fadhila returning the largest single bloc.' Given the country's Sunni comprise about 40% of the population – so never to rule in their own right – and that they in essence voted in disciplined blocs, I'm not certain how a UIA and KA combined majority illustrates anything other than maths. Coincidentally, that same irrelevant political potency among insurgent leaders is what helped so mightily to propel longtime CIA asset and true secularist (and my personal friend) Ayad Allawi to a by-the-numbers victory in the last national election.
• And 'in the Shi'ite south and Kurdish north sectarian control was established' is absolutely half-right. Having paid the IRGC 'administration fees' to cross illegally from Iran into Kurdistan months before the invasion, I came to know and love the Kurdish community in the north well. In both Kurdish domains – PUK and KDP – there's a feel of a one-party state. Purely secular. Anything but sectarian.

Look, I could nitpick further but I hope my concerns about the precision of Woolner's ditty have been made clear.

That just leaves the essence of Woolner's assault on my musings. Unless I'm mistaken, his position seems to be founded upon some unstated or implied sense of a political and military hegemony and predestination in US policy which I simply did not observe in the war's early years. I think such a premise – for what was essentially policy and tactics devised on the run – benefits from the luxury of distance.

And if, as charged, I've tripped down a fantastic rabbit hole of fake memory or diminished sight then I can tell you I'm not alone down here with the Queen of Hearts. Since Woolner's offering I've contacted former Green Beret Colonel Rick Welch to confirm I hadn't gone insane. Indeed, I now believe he's writing a book that deals with the insurgency we never had to have. Also, there's former Prime Minster Allawi, who once attempted a CIA-backed coup d'etat in the mid-1990s using mostly Sunni military officers in Iraq and from 2003 onwards persisted with efforts to return those same commanders and their men (the then-insurgency) back in to the fold. He too contends the invasion was sound but that the insurgency didn't have to be.

Agreeing with him is a great man Allawi introduced me to, another good mate, former Iraqi General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, a man with an incredible Hollywood-esque back-story: war hero, dissident, CIA asset and, commencing in mid-2004, the inaugural head of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (the country's CIA equivalent). Before Fallujah, actually after Fallujah too, and in the years leading up to the tribal Awakening programme, he pressed to stop a guerrilla war he knew to be unnecessary and avoidable. He consistently acted as conduit, mediator and counsel for both the US and the Sunni commanders.

The decisions enacted by Bremer, particularly the disbandment of the Iraqi military, were not preconceived constructs elicited from DC. Rather they were stunning audibles (to use a Gridiron expression) made on the fly and to the great dismay of almost all else involved.

So, I maintain the 'fantasy' of my argument. Indeed I renew it with vigour. In a perfect world the West could have invaded, overthrown Saddam, prevented looting and left (let's say, for argument's sake) by the beginning of 2004. All without the 4000-plus deaths that followed President George W Bush's farcical May 2003 declaration of an end to hostilities. If only it had of been so.

Photo by Flickr user The US Army.

US Army Major Matthew Cavanaugh writes:

I think Rodger Shanahan is taking The Interpreter's distinguished readers on a bit of a wild-goose chase with the Iraq War violence figures. They're important, but frankly there will never be a solid set of numbers on which we can objectively agree are correct.

This was my point in bringing up the Bobby Ghosh piece or 'The Lifesaving War'. It wasn’t accurate — none were (or are). Just as the Lancet's figures were inaccurate. Sean Gourley (interestingly enough, a Kiwi) at Oxford pointed that out. It will be a long time until we get good public data from Iraq, so everyone chooses to see what they want to see regarding numbers.

The analysis will not be satisfying no matter what the conclusions. For example, if there was a figure from an eminently credible organization that had kept the exactly correct number secret (for some unspecified reason), would it change anyone's mind, either way, about the war? I suspect not.

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Let's also get off the ad hominem. Whether Rodger is 'particularly disappointed' or not, he's now added 'lazy intellectually' to the 'Orientalist' comment. Both were about the person, not the idea, so let's just stick to the subject. Which is the Iraq War, and its appropriate place in our collective rear view mirrors. What was gained?  At what cost? These are things we can really discuss and learn from. Because that's the point - learning so the next choice is (hopefully) better.

Getting back to Ghosh, he brings up a very interesting counter-factual: that Saddam would have survived the Arab Spring. Is this not a more worthy topic than retreading (the numbers) ground that has been chewed to bits?

Albert Palazzo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Land Warfare Studies Centre. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the Department of Defence or the Australian Government.

Alison Broinowski misinterpreted the key point I made in my Interpreter post of 25 March on why Australia decided to join the US in going to war with Iraq in 2003. Except for its appearance in the title, my post makes no mention of ANZUS, nor did I write that Australia was obligated to participate because of ANZUS. Instead, my point was that its own interests motivated Australia in deciding on war — it was not by a knee-jerk response to its alliance with the US. Australia went into the war with its eyes wide open and in pursuit of its own policy objectives, which it achieved.

Perhaps Broinowski's misinterpretation was aided by the title under which the piece appeared: We went to Iraq for ANZUS. This headline was the editor's choice (sorry Sam); mine had been the less provocative Australia and Going to War with Iraq.

I also found Broinowski's post unsettling for another reason. I would not accept that it is necessary for US leaders to remind Australians that our security is our responsibility. I'd hope that Australia has sufficient maturity as a sovereign state and society to realise that on its own. Australia's relationship with the US is part of a considered national security policy based on the recognition and support of mutual interests. I'm yet to hear a more viable alternative to this arrangement.

As Matt Cavanaugh points out in his response to my post, the difficulty in determining civilian casualties in any conflict (including Iraq) is enormous. My point was that Jim Molan had made an assertion that violence was worse under Saddam without a reference point, no feel for what the average monthly body count is a decade after the invasion, and no indication why we should consider the current situation better than what preceded it. To put Jim Molan's comment into some context and to garner an explanation as to how he arrived at his assertion, I provided a total from Iraq Body Count which, while not perfect, is at least transparent. 

Matt's figures cited in response lack objectivity, let alone transparency. I note that Matt cited a source describing Saddam as having caused deaths at a 'conservative estimate' of 16,000 a year. Matt must have chosen the word 'conservative' advisedly as his source for these figures was a 2004 article entitled The Lifesaving War in the ultra-conservative The Weekly Standard, a magazine founded by William Kristol, one of the most ardent neoconservative advocates of invading Iraq. Not exactly an objective or even transparent source. 

The article presupposes that victory has been achieved simply as a result of the invasion and, if you can read this tripe through to the end, you'll realise that the author believes that 'Liberation made it possible...(to save) approximately 60,000 lives a year'. Unfortunately, writing just over a year after the invasion, the author wasn't so prescient in understanding that many didn't agree with the word 'liberation'. The war had many more years to run and tens of thousands more deaths to inflict. [fold]

Jim Molan's reply also highlighted the pitfalls in trying to measure which period had the greatest bloodshed. In order to emphasise how violent Saddam was, Jim sought to include the one million dead from the Iran-Iraq war, but failed to mention the degree to which Saddam's war efforts were supported by the US. If responsibility for the deaths caused by the Iran-Iraq war goes to Saddam then what responsibility should those who supported him in such an endeavour bear?

Regarding my point about relative standards of violence, Matt may want to re-read my post, as I didn't try to argue that there is more regular violence in Brazil, South Africa or Chicago than there is in Iraq. I am, moreover, particularly disappointed that Matt seriously thinks I would accuse Jim Molan of racism. I believe Jim's argument was lazy intellectually as he neither disaggregated the Middle East (meaning he believes that Omanis, for instance, wouldn't think Iraqi violence is appalling because they're from the Middle East) nor did he acknowledge that most other parts of the world (including Europe) are prone to shocking and widespread communal and political violence, given the correct circumstances. Jim should not relativise violence or people's acceptance of it. 

I am still unsure what Jim meant when he said that 'Compared to Australia, the violence is appalling but by Middle East and Iraqi standards, one may arrive at a different judgment.' Given that he said in his most recent post that he generally writes what he means, he must believe that Iraq and the Middle East share a common standard regarding what constitutes appalling violence. He never sought to define what he believed that standard to be, which intrigues me. To my mind, it raises the question: if Jim believes there is a Middle Eastern standard of violence, does it not follow that there must be an African one, a European one etc?

Photo by Flickr user expertinfantry.