The Iraq war decision ten years on
Graeme Dobell’s contributions are always entertaining and frequently insightful, which makes it forgivable if now and again his arguments are well wide of the mark. We had one such moment with his piece reflecting on the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, where he slams the public service for its passivity and silence in failing to oppose the war and indeed doing ‘… a worse job of confronting the issues than did their predecessors during the lousy processes that sent Australia off to Vietnam’. That’s a remarkably harsh judgement, and one informed with the benefit of hindsight unavailable to the original decision makers or their advisers. It overstates what might reasonably be expected of public servants in advising Cabinet and undersells the deliberations that actually took place.
I’m sure it was the case that some senior public servants opposed going to war—as did a fair chunk of the population—but many in the national security community would also have backed the decision. There was no gulf of silence between the bureaucracy and Government, but more a shared acceptance of the dimension of the problem and the likely end point.
It might be correct to say that there was no specific cabinet paper arguing the pros and cons of involvement in the Iraq war, but there was a very substantial flow of reporting to government: intelligence judgements on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs; diplomatic reporting about efforts to get Iraq to be more transparent on its weapons plans and on manoeuvres at the UN; military reporting on US and allied preparations and on the likely opposition. These were the issues around which there was intense public debate and public service policy work. In his autobiography, Lazarus Rising, John Howard acknowledges a failure on the part of the occupying powers not to think through the military requirements of the post-invasion phase. That was clearly a profound mistake, but hardly one on which Australia was alone. Read more