an awkward anniversary

You might be forgiven for failing to notice the ten year anniversary of the second Iraq War at the end of last month, because it hardly made the news. The majority of coverage that the occasion received in the mainstream media was limited to short summary pieces that served as filler in between round-the-clock political speculation. That the same institutions which helped enable the reckless slide to war a decade ago are now unwilling to face up to certain harsh realities is hardly surprising.    

   
Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, let’s begin with a round-up of the war itself. In March of 2003 much of the western world, led by the bellicose United States, launched a war of aggression against the notorious dictator (and ex-US ally) Saddam Hussein. The pretext for the war (that Hussein possessed and was willing to use weapons of mass destruction) we now know was a barefaced lie. What is interesting is that this was also known very well at the time. UN inspectors had repeatedly and unambiguously stated that Iraq had no active weapons program, and we have since learned that the Iraqi government itself had explicitly declared to have no weapons of mass destruction.  And even supposing it had been true that Iraq had nuclear or biological weapons, which it did not, launching a pre-emptive war would still be totally illegal. The Nuremberg trials famously labelled aggressive war “…the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Nevertheless despite massive protests across the globe, UN opposition and the whole thing being unmistakably illegal, the war went ahead with Australia as a proud member of the “coalition of the willing”.     

Long story short, the war was a humanitarian, strategic and moral disaster that grinded on for eight bloody years.           

Ten years later and it would appear that few people are interested in holding those who orchestrated and enabled this crime to account. Just as the perpetrators of the Haditha massacre have managed to avoid spending even a single hour in jail, the main architects of the greatest crime so far this millennium (think Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld) will almost certainly never be held accountable. Lamentably there is not much you and I can do about this. As everyone knows, war crimes are only crimes when committed by the other side, and American servicemen have always been effectively immune to prosecution or  responsibility (think My Lai).                      

But what we can and should do is hold our own leaders and institutions to account here in Australia, be it in the courts or, far more likely, just popular opinion. And by this I do not just mean the politicians from both sides who fell over themselves to get onboard the armoured bandwagon. Equally culpable for the bloodshed is the media establishment that failed in its responsibility to thoroughly scrutinize government decisions and provide balance. Failure also rests with the Australian people as a whole who, despite being overwhelmingly against the invasion, could not or did not prevent the enthusiastic participation of their elected leaders. Because let’s be absolutely clear about this: Australia should have never been involved with the war, it should have opposed it. If we can’t face up to these realities then there will be no catharsis.  

It is not enough to be aware of the Iraq catastrophe, understand it was evil, and write it off as a bad experience. The conflict is in many ways a microcosm of the countless failings of our modern world, and until the specific errors which led to Australia’s involvement in such an obviously criminal enterprise are aired publicly we remain at risk of repeating them. As a nation we need to atone for the sin of invading another country without provocation, something we do not usually think of “the lucky country” as being in the habit of doing. We should not accept living in a society where murder is tacitly allowable so long as it is committed on a grand enough scale.         

In the words of David Atkins: “The failure to prosecute the crime of the century in defrauding the world to invade Iraq is a moral stain that will never fully wash out of the fabric of society until justice is done.”    

With such a diffusion of responsibility I can only guess as to what justice for the Iraq war would look like, but politely ignoring the fact that just ten years ago our nation willingly joined in a horrible war of aggression just isn’t going to work.