From Security to Liberation: Shifting Pro-war Discourses on the Iraq War

Binoy Kampmark¹

In April 2003, President George W. Bush declared that formal military operations in Iraq had ended. The war, it was suggested, was one in a series of engagements with terrorists that would continue under the commonly termed notion of a ‘war on terror.’ But the Iraqi problem remains with daily casualties on Coalition troops and fruitless attempts on the part of the Anglo-American forces to find ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMD).² Neither objective – whether involving the finding of the weapons in question or the establishment of civil order in Iraq – has been achieved with any degree of success. The commencement of this phase of the Iraqi conflict gives historians a chance to scrutinise the reasons for invading Iraq, with the various ‘shifts’ in the rhetoric of the various administrations behind the ‘Coalition of the Willing.’

The dominant political discourse in sections of the Australian media and government was that the Iraq invasion was necessary because Saddam Hussein posed a threat to Western interests in particular and Australian interests in general. He was, so went the argument, an imminent threat to Australia’s security interests, accentuated by his possession of WMD and the likelihood that these might be passed on to terrorist groups. ³ This particular narrative rendered notions of human rights marginal, the oppression of the Iraqi citizen as less important than Saddam as ‘terrorist’ to broader issues of security. But this emphasis was qualified once the invasion began. The emancipation of Iraq and its people started becoming central in the justification for overthrowing Saddam. This was by no means clear in initial arguments. The protagonists in the Iraqi conflict manifested in the rhetoric of liberty, either as recipients of freedom or providers: Iraqi civilians in the pro-war discourse were only rendered visible through the concept of liberty as informed by soldiers of the “Coalition of the Willing.” The Iraqi civilian, previously absent in political narratives of security, became idealised. The spectators of this liberated subject – the American and Australian pro-war advocates - could only see soldiers as realising Iraqi democracy, long retarded under the Saddam regime.

In contrast, the subsequent narrative of freedom was adopted by the Australian government to consolidate the gains in Iraq as necessary for liberty, a broader objective of Middle Eastern democratisation that has been central to Washington’s new policy. As a specific example, the Government decided to focus on the Australian soldier as the disseminator of liberty, an event that proved effective in the rhetoric of the Anzac. The peace-protester in contrast was not heroic but a totalitarian apologist, an appeaser. In the process, the initial security focus of the war – not the “freedom” notion so much as geopolitical sentiments for redrawing the lines in the Middle East and the pathological dread of weapons of mass destruction – becomes less important. Over time the security threat posed by Saddam to Australia has been dropped in the rhetorical strategies of the Australian government and sections of the popular press, competing alongside a liberation discourse that is framed as a humanitarian narrative.

This essay seeks to interrogate these particular shifts within the context of the US-Australian alliance and global strategic environment, though it acknowledges that any comprehensive analysis as to why these shifts occurred would require further debate. Nonetheless, this paper can commence a discussion on the subject by suggesting a few reasons as to why these might have occurred. Clearly, a significant aspect of the problem has been to elevate terrorism to an ideology of its own accord, a process that has converted the Middle East into an authoritarian belt of states in need of reform through “a new species ... of imperial mission for America.”⁴ Islamic terrorism is given the mantle much as that of Nazism of Communism, a mantle that somehow destroys the conceptual distinctions between State and non-State. Richard Perle, Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense between 1981-7 argued before an audience of the conservative American Enterprise Institute in early 2003 how “democracies must confront totalitarian rule when they find it. That was true of the Nazis. It was true of the communists. Takes a slightly different form now, because it’s also true of the terrorists.”⁵ The short-hand term of this terrorism is Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic Fascism,⁶ a view which leads to a startling muddling of political categories. Iraq became a matter of global security, a view that was completed with Coalition attempts to link it with Al Qaeda. Once the link was established, Iraq was fitted into an extraordinary dynamic: a secular state had become an ally of a fundamentalist non-state force. A keen observer of Asian perceptions of Australia, former diplomat Alison Broinowski, argued that the result of such reasoning was, and could be disastrous for Australia’s long-term interests in the Asia-Pacific, as Iraq, “without proven links to Al Qaeda, was the wrong place for the wrong war.”⁷

This tendency was well patterned in the dominant American political discourses which radicalised evil during the ‘war on terror’ in the messianic rhetoric of the Bush Administration, a discourse which remained above and beyond empirical guidelines in a new strategic environment.⁸ The intersection between security and emancipation is then made with ease in the absence of WMDs, since the broader problem of the Middle East had been globalised as a security threat which could only be eliminated through the elimination of WMDs and Islamic fundamentalism. Both constitute a “modernisation” thesis within the Bush Administration, that has been embraced in Canberra, and was fully revealed as the war continued.⁹

The initial discourse: terrorism and security

One of the features of the Bush Administration’s policy after 9/11 was its strategic positioning against terrorists and regimes considered possessors of WMD. The merits of this pathological fear of “rogue” states in possession of such weapons, and whether they would pass them on to non-state organisations such as Al-Qaeda was itself a dubious one. Chemical and biological weapons had been used with impunity before, not least of all during the Iraq-Iran War, which was received with mixed response from the present members of the “Coalition of the Willing.”¹⁰ The most notable feature of Australian political discourse after 9/11 was its mirroring of America’s fear, centring terror in its policy initiatives. A security discourse was constructed around intervening in Iraq to neutralise a seemingly unstable Hussein in the Middle East.

The shift to concerns for Iraq’s liberty and freedom after the invasion had commenced can be contrasted with the pre-war attitudes of Canberra towards the Iraqi population. This entire attitude viewing Iraq within the international system as a deviant requiring policing is the hallmark of this approach: the removal of the dictator and the abuse of human rights was not central. Canberra was satisfied with UN backed sanctions as long as Iraq refused to disarm, unconcerned that such sanctions had cost the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis.¹¹ The attitudes to Iraq had less to do with human rights than principles of state behaviour in the international system, most notably to the UN program of weapons inspections.

This precedent had gone back to immediately after the first Gulf War, and indeed to the entire disposition of the West towards the Hussein regime. The literature on the subject of Iraq in the international security system demonstrates the US-European interest in Iraq as a regional security buffer against fundamentalism, not an abuser of human rights on a mass scale requiring redress at international law.¹² For the French administration of Francois Mitterand, arms-sales to Iraq were justified to maintain “the historic balance between the Persians and the Arabs, a balance would have triggered a chain reaction.”¹³ The telegram traffic in the US State Department during the 1980s was similarly revealing, showing that the United States viewed Saddam as a key buffer against fundamentalism. As former US State Department official Bruce W. Jentleson has argued, the Reagan Administration “initiated an opening to Iraq, a staunch adversary for the previous quarter century” in a strategy designed “to tilt the balance of power against the United States’ two even stauncher adversaries of the day: against Iran, with which Iraq was at war, and against the Soviet Union, Iraq’s principal patron but with which relations had grown strained.”¹⁴ Despite some reservations about the brutal dictator, Iraq itself was less a threat than Iranian belligerency. As one National Security Directive issued by President Reagan at the time notes, “In recognition of the growing threat of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, the Secretary of Defense will direct the enhancement of the anti-terrorist posture of U.S. military activities and facilities in the Persian Gulf region”.¹⁵

An example of how Iraq as a serious security issue was developed after the 9/11 attacks can be found in numerous political speeches and incidental commentary generated in Australia at that time. Internationally, Howard made his case in a press conference with President Bush in the White House on 10 February 2003. “Australia’s position concerning Iraq is very clear. We believe a world in which weapons of mass destruction are in the hands of rogue states, with the potential threat of them falling into the hands of terrorists, is not a world that Australia - if we can possibly avoid it - wants to be part of. And that is the fundamental reason why Australia has taken the position she has.”¹⁶ There was no direct mention of the Iraqi population: the reasons, Howard suggested in the statement, were exhaustive. In the broader political circles of Canberra, a similar theme was developing. We find the Prime Minister deliberating about Iraq less as an object of tyranny to be neutralised than a terrorist threat to be pre-emptively struck: “But we have a direct national interest in ensuring that these weapons do not proliferate and that the mechanisms established by the international community to prevent this are as effective as possible.”¹⁷ Even after 9/11, the Prime Minister was more concerned about Baghdad’s weapons program than any distinct ‘liberation’ theme for the Iraqi people: “The events of 11 September 2001 and 12 October 2002 highlight that we cannot afford to leave such threats [posed by Saddam’s weapons] to international security unaddressed.”¹⁸

We find the same tendencies in the releases and speeches of Defense Minister Senator Robert Hill. In his farewell address to Australian forces destined for the Gulf on 14 February, Hill argued that, “The threats of today of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are just as challenging and important as the threats of bygone eras where states were threatening other states.”¹⁹ As with the general stance of Canberra at that point in time, there was the possibility that Saddam would still remain in power: “Our pre-deployment is in part to give Saddam Hussein this last message that we want this issue to be peacefully resolved. It is also to ensure the ADF is well prepared in the event of military action.”²⁰

That same month, an early February debate on the issue of an invasion of Iraq produced in the local paper in the garrison-city of Townsville in North Queensland illustrated how the variables of terror were discussed with the notions of Saddam as a potential terrorist threat. The brutalities of the Ba’ath party proved secondary, human rights less important than Australian notions of defence. The Liberal Federal member of the seat of Herbert, Peter Lindsay interpreted the Iraqi dilemma as unequivocally one centred on “its record of aggression and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction.” It followed that Iraq’s “history of relationships and support for terrorist organisations magnifies our concern that Australia is no longer an island state immune from the activities of extremists.”²¹

These statements point to the fact that Iraq’s liberty was less important than Australian security in the pre-war debates about any military intervention. Howard accepted the option, however implausible, of a “peaceful” solution, thereby entertaining the notion that Hussein’s regime might well survive the UN’s instructions to disarm. Had it disarmed, there would have been no war, and Hussein, with his torture chambers, would have remained. Thus, Howard told journalists in Sydney in December 2002: “If Iraq complies with the United Nations Security Council resolution then we can avoid military conflict and the possibility of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists can also be avoided and that is the ultimate nightmare in this situation.”²² Conservative authors such as Padriac Mcguinness, Quadrant’s present editor, despite making a brief reference to the brutalities of the Hussein regime near the end of a Sydney Morning Herald contribution on the eve of war, also gave room for a peaceful resolution of the dispute. The onus was placed on Baghdad: “At present, war is not inevitable - it is the choice of Saddam, who has only to set about meeting the full terms of earlier UN resolutions to remove the threat of war.”²³

Commentaries such as those by McGuinness seemed entirely consistent with the “containment” doctrine that had marked over a decade of UN approaches to the Hussein regime. The Australian approach worked closely within this strategic framework, in so far as the 1990s saw Canberra’s policy endorse sanctions and an inspections-regime approach short of any over aggressive measures. The emancipist theme was less important to the notion of disarming Iraq, and even the exceptions – one work by a former NSC official of the Clinton Administration suggested that the US and its allies would ultimately have to invade Iraq “before he acquired a functioning nuclear weapon” – were mediated by the security thesis.²⁴ Thus, pro-war advocates were willing to deal with the ethical consequences of allowing the dictatorship to remain, as long as it could be disarmed of its fabled weapons of mass destruction. The power to disarm remained a choice, however fictional, in Baghdad’s hands.

This is not to say that the discourse of invading Iraq for the sake of democracy was not entertained in some narrow circles some months prior to invasion. In the United States, various think-tanks, even before 9/11 and Clinton’s time in office, had advocated the forced “democratising” of the Middle East, thereby advancing the security interests of Washington in the region and protecting Israel, while Clinton at least made the rhetorical pledge in the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 to “support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power.”²⁵Some of Rupert Murdoch’s aggressive tabloids had decided by early 2003 that Saddam had to go. In late January, the Sunday Mail’s Ron Liddle asked Queensland readers: “Why not kill Saddam and spare Iraq?” He proceeded to answer his own question with some disappointment: the “main reason we’ve failed is because democratic accountability has shackled us and made vague and hazy those areas within which our security services operate.”²⁶ At this stage, those late months in late 2002 and early 2003, the suggestion of freeing the oppressed Iraqi citizen was cursory, limited to tabloid speculation and marginal university debate.²⁷

Towards ‘Oppressed Iraqis’

As the war theme developed pace a combination of the ‘liberation’ theme and that of Australian security became evident. The pro-war discourse repositioned the Iraqi mission as libertarian. In his national address committing Australian troops to Iraq on March 20, Howard spelt the motive behind the invasion, emphasising the criminality of the Hussein regime and the threat posed by any possession of WMDs: “The Government has decided to commit Australian forces to action to disarm Iraq because we believe it is right, it is lawful and it’s in Australia’s national interest.”²⁸ Hypothetically, Howard suggested Iraq’s continued possession of “these weapons” would enable it to “use them again but moreover other rogue countries will copy Iraq knowing that the world will do nothing to stop them.” The fascination, even pathological theme of the speech was its insistence on international terrorism, which “know no borders”; and Australia’s cultural proximity to the United States which exerts a pull on Australian foreign policy: “The Americans have helped us in the past and the United States is very important to Australia’s long-term security.”

For the first time, we find the plight of the Iraqi people idealised as oppressed subjects, thereby becoming a moral referent against Saddam’s regime: “This week, the Times of London detailed the use of a human shredding machine as a vehicle for putting to death critics of Saddam Hussein … The removal of Saddam Hussein will lift this immense burden of terror from the Iraqi people.”²⁹ The liberty discourse repositioned Australian aims and purposes in the Middle East, modifying the original purposes of the intervention (disarming a dangerous regime of its weapons) with an emancipist theme. A day after the scenes of ‘liberation’ were recorded across news channels, Robert Hill spoke of additional benefits of the operation against Iraq. “So our primary objective was to rid the regime of weapons of mass destruction but we said that if we can get the incidental benefit of giving the Iraqis a better future then they are entitled to that benefit.”³⁰

But this ‘incidental’ dividend was exaggerated in the popular press. The Friday of 11 April, Australian papers featured an effective characterisation of the invasion as one of ‘liberation.’ This anomalous label (one cannot liberate a nation from itself without an invasion) proceeded to efface the original ‘security’ intentions of the conflict. The Courier-Mail article of 11 April omitted any reference to discovering any weapons: there were none to be found in the hastily compiled account, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: 21 Days that Shook the World and toppled a Tyrant.”³¹ There were only the distinct features of a freedom-fighting morality tale: the “toppled” statue of Saddam on April 9, the crowds of cheering onlookers. The account emphasises lightness: light casualties, a rapid disintegration of the Saddam regime, and the impact of the Coalition forces. Invasion becomes an object of dissimulation: in its place is the object of liberation. The Features section of the Brisbane paper began one of its articles by observing that the entire invasion was aimed at unshackling an oppressed Iraqi populace, oblivious to the sinister allusions by American officials to previous invasions in history: “Against a numerically superior force, the coalition divisions liberated Baghdad in just three weeks, leading Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to liken it to the German blitzkrieg - literally, lightning war - in 1940.”³² The paper was coy: there were doubts about the sincerity of the operation, but such criticisms had to give way to the genuine words of “commanding officer of the Royal Irish Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins: “We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.”³³

The mythology of liberation at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph was even more pronounced in its 11 April issue with much commentary on the fallen statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Al-Firduz Square. The fallen Saddam statue was rapidly draped in what was the reductio ad absurdum of the liberty discourse: an American flag said to have emanated from the “rubble” of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. “The US flag which liberated Iraq when it was thrown over a statue of dictator Saddam Hussein had been pulled out from the rubble of the devastating attack on America’s own sense of freedom.”³⁴ But even the Telegraph had to deviate slightly form the liberation account: Iraqis had been aghast at the intrusive Stars-and-Stripes, interpreting it as a gesture of “colonialism”, but all went well after a pre-Gulf War Iraqi flag replaced the aberration.

The extent of how distorting this particular liberation narrative proved could be gathered in investigations done into the veracity of the Telegraph story. Everything from the nature of the statue’s falling (supposed crowds of spectators) to the origins of the flag have been subsequently challenged. There were no throngs around the event, and the particular flag was a fake, having never emanated from the rubble of the destroyed Pentagon: they had been stage-managed for the narrative of liberty.³⁵ The entire simulated event had its supporters, specially for those convinced by the “real” embodied by the televisual projections of twenty-hour channels: “The notion expressed by Ray Brindle (GG, 24/4) that the whole event was stage managed is a preposterous revision of history.”³⁶ Thus, the viewer could suggest that, “One of the joys of cable TV is being able to view four news channels. On April 9 I spent five hours riveted to the television watching events unfold outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad - from before the marines’ arrival, through to the toppling of Saddam’s statue.”³⁷

Nine days later, the shift from security to liberty frameworks of debate was illustrated in the tabloid columns of journalist Andrew Bolt, who attacked the pacifist movement for its exaggerated predictions of a bloodbath. The strategy in the article “They Were Wrong” began with the narrative of liberation as the central point: “Did you see Iraqi’s kiss and hug the Allied soldiers – our soldiers – who gave them their freedom after decades of terror?” The rhetorical use of the Holocaust makes itself visible in the text, with the Allied soldiers disseminators of freedom. “Did you see our soldiers break open Saddam’s torture centres ad his jails for children, or see their survivors praise us, showing the livid scars left by Saddam’s thugs ... ?”³⁸ The text then becomes curiously simplistic, a puritanical categorisation of the war as a mere issue of good versus evil. Heading the article were two photos, with Bolt’s moral dualism emphasised, a peace-activist with a placard marked “Stop killing our sisters and brothers”, raging, ineffectual, beside a picture of the virtuous American soldier, kissed by the “liberated” Iraqi children.

The Left, according to Bolt, were sinister in their opposition, letting “self-indulgent loathing of capitalism or the US or John Howard blind them to real truths and the real evil.” Bolt’s puritanical exegesis became a matter of numbers: the Left asserted a death toll that never eventuated; while Bolt countered with Saddam’s own legacies of murdered civilians and brutal reprisals. “Every death toll is horrible, but put this in context. In just one reprisal, Saddam’s men slaughtered 30,000 civilians in Basra in 1991.”

Bolt’s reasoning would be repeated in editorial comment and opinion sections in the media. Australia’s violation of international law, deception over Iraq’s alleged WMD arsenal and exaggerated intelligence assessments are of little consequence to the emancipation of the ‘people’, who have suffered atrocities in grave number. One of Hussein’s biographers, in an extracted article in the Australian, focused on the dictator’s atrocities (“even the experts are starting to lose count of just how many atrocities were committed by the Iraqi dictator’s henchmen”), crimes which justified his removal at whatever legal price. “Having just returned from three weeks in post-liberation Iraq, I find it almost perverse that anyone should question the wisdom of removing Hussein from power.”³⁹ Some readers were similarly astounded that the invading powers needed to find any weapons at all. “How much more mass destruction did they want to see,” rejoined a reader of the Sydney Morning Herald in June 2003, “than that perpetrated by Saddam Hussein on his people? The allies have eliminated those people’s weapon of mass destruction. There’s no doubt about it, the apologists and the lefties are sore losers.”⁴⁰ Another message, similar in tone. “Those bleating about the non-discovery (so far) of WMDs in Iraq obviously would rather have Saddam still there, torturing and slaughtering.”⁴¹

Australia, and even the United States, become havens of paradise despite their dissimulating state craft; Saddam’s Iraq, a dystopia in contrast, becomes a society in need of amelioration. These dichotomies are evidenced by numerous examples gathered from public responses in newspapers. In Melbourne, a Croydon resident was suggesting that liberty was an objective principle, a freedom developed without cultural or social limits, only to concede that, if it was American, it had to be better than any Arab alternative: “If the purity of freedom is as important as the purity of air, then give the Iraqis American air.”⁴² A resident of North Queensland spoke of America the virtuous, a fantasy world where rate of crime had “dropped dramatically,” an ideal example for the Iraqi people to endorse.⁴³ The popular discourses visible in the media have featured stories since the invasion of life after the overthrow of Saddam: freedom to worship Shiite images, freedom to engage in conversations unfettered by the observations of the secret police. In the words of an article in the Daily Telegraph in July, “In Saddam’s time, the mere act of pointing at something - a building, a person - risked attracting secret police. Now people freely jab their index fingers on the streets.”⁴⁴

Howard’s visit to the United States, and Bush’s ranch, in May 2003 brought the discussion of liberation more to the fore. Bush remarked in one meeting with Howard that, “By getting rid of Saddam Hussein, we ended the suffering of a lot of people in Iraq. And at the same time, we made peace more possible in the world.”⁴⁵ Howard concurred, marking the operation as one inspired by freedom. “And we, too, have one aspiration for the Iraqi people, that they can live in freedom and they can run their own affairs, and they can benefit from the great civilization and the great resources which, unhindered, are at their disposal.”⁴⁶ This particular narrative of liberty effectively cleansed the conflict of miscalculation and dissimulation. In the discourse of freedom, casualties are noble and dissent against the war, an apology for Saddam’s crimes.

Virtuous soldiers

Bolt’s conceptual white-washing of the subtleties of international law and the entire ethical contradictions of the conflict mirrored a shift in discursive practices not just in discussing the oppressed Iraqi, but also the virtuous Coalition soldier. The victimhood of the Iraqis was complemented, indeed indispensable to the liberation-zeal of the Australian soldiers. The Daily Telegraph illustrated this theme on 24 March 2003 when it sought messages of support from the Australian public for service personnel who were “fulfilling our country’s commitment to a free and disarmed Iraq”.⁴⁷ A month later, on April 25, the same paper idealised on of the personnel: “And as one of Australia’s Iraqi liberators, Squadron Leader [Jackie] Churchill will feel a bond with her forebears she has never experienced in her 14 years of service.” Despite being “hurt” by peace-protests, Churchill was proud that, “In Australia we have the right to protest. If you see what the Iraqis have had to endure, you appreciate that we are lucky.”⁴⁸

Such views have also been expressed in the political discourse emanating from Canberra, where the metaphor of the share-market has been used to highlight the noble incentives of removing a tyrant. In the same July radio interview already cited, Howard suggested that, “We have the added humanitarian dividend and human rights dividend of having removed a terrible regime, and every day reveals more mass graves.”⁴⁹ Hill similarly emphasised the travails of the Iraqi people in his address to a security conference in Singapore held at the end of May. WMD was not merely a means of threatening the world, but an instrument of torture against the Iraqi citizens, a threat which had been removed by “an international coalition led by the United States”. “Iraqi people have been given their freedom after decades of fear and oppression. Furthermore the Iraqi people and their neighbours will no longer fear weapons of mass destruction.”⁵⁰

Those outside the idealisations of the “liberation” paradigm were excluded as totalitarian sympathisers. The letters to the Australian on 14 April provided a sample, with one Bayswater resident convinced that peace-activists had been suffering from hallucinations: “And, internationally, the winner [for the unreality award] is ... Jacques Chirac. Nationally, the result is a three way tie ... Bob Brown, Simon Crean and Carmen Lawrence please step forward.”⁵¹ Thus, in the discourse of liberty, those opposing war must, in the privileged narrative, be the vicious other (neither soldier nor Iraqi civilian), a limitation on the virtues of Australian messianic mission. The local “shock-jock” of Adelaide radio Jeremy Cordeaux was opining just prior to the conflict that anti-war protestors should be bombarded by “anthrax,” thereby realising the classic fantasy of the reified protester as a non-entity suitable for elimination before the noble ideals of “liberal democracy”.

Pacifists also tended to be marginalised in contrast to their more belligerent opposites on the battlefield, a trend evident in the newspaper letters across the countries. Labor leader Simon Crean had presumed, reasoned one Queensland resident in a letter to the editor of the Townsville Bulletin, that “had [he] been prime minister he would have led Australia to join the coalition of the unwilling with such countries and North Korea, China and perhaps Cuba as our allies.” The same letter, noting that all these countries shared a “common” bond, a penchant for imprisoning political dissidents, ignored democratic countries firmly against the war, notably France and Germany. The Australian mission, he could conclude, had only been one to “free the people of Iraq from intimidation and tyranny.”⁵² Another letter to the Australian argued how, “In 1945 the US were the liberators of Holocaust survivors from the Nazi regime. They cared for us with great compassion. We survivors are very grateful.” There was no reason for the Iraqis to fear these agents of freedom.⁵³ In South Australia, a letter from Modbury South could not resist the Hitlerite analogy and the necessity of force: “Had the allied forces of the time failed in defeating Hitler by force, I wonder what kind of civil liberties and conditions we would now be enjoying?”⁵⁴

This paradigmatic approach of hero-victim, effacing the raison d’être for the war (WMD, Saddam as terrorist), became clearer on Anzac Day, where the Australian soldier was sanctified, like the ideal Iraqi type he or she liberated, as the agent of freedom. The liberty narrative forced its way into the celebrations. According to a contributor to the Sunday Age, “Australian forces conducted themselves with distinction on the road to Baghdad and, because of this, the shine on the Anzac legend is brighter this year.”⁵⁵ The writer found parallels with fighting, ignoring the fact that Australia was, along with the other Allies in 1915, an invasion force seeking to defeat a sovereign state. Howard’s address in Canberra at the Anzac Day parade idealised the same Australians, encrusting the mission against Iraq with noble parallels: “They went in our name in a just cause to do good things to liberate a people. They are part of a great tradition of honourable service by the Australian military forces.”⁵⁶

This particular ideology had perverse outcomes, reshaping a previous invasion on an Arab nation as an example of emancipative valour. The Anzac soldier, ennobled with the spirit of liberty, invaded the shores of Turkey in 1915 in the name of freedom. In Hill’s words, “There were lives lost to preserve our freedom and that of our friends and allies – often very distant from Australian shores and in many instances in this region of the world.” Thus, these idealised combatants were, as were Australians at Gallipoli, promoting the cause of freedom through their sacrifice in removing the modern threat to freedom: “Thus it’s an equal honour this year to be able to speak to today’s service personnel, back in the Middle East again, risking their lives in an effort to remove threats associated with weapons of mass destruction.” ⁵⁷ Historical narrative gives way to the mythology of liberty: an invasion force against Ottoman Turkey that was defeated (was it Turkish freedom at stake as well?), to a victorious Australian contingent that had conserved Australian liberty through an realising its values in an overseas theatre, namely, Iraq. “You have,” surmised Hill, “also given the Iraqi people the opportunity of freedom.”⁵⁸ A cynical resident from Lawrence put things in perspective: “I guess they are simply doing their best to refresh the Anzac pool for future parades.”⁵⁹

Anzacs were not the only individuals rendered heroic in the post-war dialogue on Iraq. The discourse of liberty, just as it demonised the peace protester, canonized the resistance fighter, the deposer of brutal dictators, individuals who actively sought to disrupt the internal workings of Iraq. One was the “murdered” Paul Moran. As the Adelaide Advertiser put it, “Murdered Adelaide cameraman Paul Moran spent more than a decade trying to help destabilise the regime of Saddam Hussein, his family and friends have revealed.”⁶⁰ His political credentials included, amongst other things, “working for an American public relations company contracted by the US Central Intelligence Agency to run propaganda campaigns against the dictatorship.” An American marine of Colorado Springs wanted the freedom-loving credentials of Moran to be noted for posterity: “I want the people of Australia, the people of Adelaide, Ivana, and especially his daughter, Tara, to know that Paul Moran will be missed by those of us in the US.”⁶¹

Reasoning the shifts

In the security discourse emanating from Washington and adopted by Canberra, non-state actors are reasoned as paradigmatic of State ideology, which demonstrates a conceptual weakness. It seems the policy argument about how the State responds to non-State agents comes back to the same problem: that the discourse on how the state enacts its policies against non-States cannot transcend its own boundaries.⁶² The global security environment is therefore reasoned by the Coalition as one where “failed states” possess the potential to slide into terrorist hands, where unstable regimes have the potential to pass WMDs to terrorists, and where the doctrine of pre-emptive strike is required as an urgent remedy to deter regional instability.⁶³

Australia has duly signalled its desire to engage on a more pre-emptive basis in both the Middle East and the Pacific region in line with this new policy, a policy that is revolutionary for ignoring the significance of sovereignty in favour of variables such as terrorism or government instability. The fact that such a venture as the Solomons intervention was prompted by an appeal from Honiara does not count against the transformation of Canberra’s views of the region consistent with its Iraq policy.⁶⁴ It stands in line with broader strategic interests shared with the United States in stabilising the Pacific region, a fact that was alluded to by President Bush in his remarks on Australia being the US regional “deputy sheriff”. But more to the point, Australia’s participation in the Iraq war was an attempt to ally itself to the world’s only superpower. As a publication from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) noted in 2002, “In the foreseeable future, no other country or group of countries will be able to challenge the United States’ overall capacity to shape the global environment.”⁶⁵

The point of intersection between the discourse of emancipation and the discourse of security is apparent when one realises that the liberal-democratic reading of modern non-state terrorism becomes an ideology that reasons world peace as possible only where terrorism, WMDs and rogue states are jointly eliminated.⁶⁶ In this, the regime of Saddam Hussein ceased to be either the necessary bulwark against fundamentalism that it had been in the 1980s, since it was assumed to be allied to its representatives (Al Qaeda), and constituted as part and parcel of the same problem. Nor could it remain a serf-state governed by UN sanctions and weapons inspections, because WMDs had been revised as morally repugnant after 9/11, the very same weapons considered possible acquisitions by terrorists.

As war continued, the failure to find weapons simply enabled Canberra to fall back on notions of democracy and ideology. Even if the debate in Australia and the United States was initially one extolling a security dimension, there was a remarkable ease in justifying the invasion after the fact as a liberation exercise. Evidence was no substitute for ideology. The cultural “values” that the three Anglophone countries in the Coalition shared thereby promoted the liberty discourse as inherent in the unique messianic message of the Anglo-Celtic view of liberty. Howard himself observed in 2001 how the relationship with the United States was “the most important we have with any single country” through the “values and aspirations we share.”⁶⁷ A critical Broinowki hinted at this tendency when she found Australia’s uncritical engagement with the US on Iraq a dangerous advertisement to its Asian neighbours, while June R. Verrier argued that these “values,” revolving around “western Judeo-Christian, democratic and developed societies” may no longer hold.⁶⁸ The disagreement towards UN preference for arms-inspections from Canberra and Washington was thus more than merely symbolic: it signified America’s preference to modify alliances in the new strategic environment, with a radical departure on Australia’s part from its role as an “aligned middle power,” to an aggressive ally seeking to “‘win’ the global future through US attacks on rogue states and US-controlled corporate interests.”⁶⁹

Conclusion

The shift from the security discourse and reasons for attacking Iraq to a notion of social change and democratisation has now been confirmed. The entire discourse has in fact lessened the relevance of Saddam’s weapons and the necessity for finding them. The empirical framework, the need for evidence, in seeking such weapons has collapsed. In the United States, a New York Times contributor has argued that, “As far as I’m concerned we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war … Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue.)”⁷⁰ The extent of this failure is now so pronounced that US politicians are expressing concern that Iraq may have been invaded under false pretences. Democrat Senator Richard C. Byrd of West Virginia told the US Senate on 21 May, 2003 that, “Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises.”⁷¹

In Britain, the Hutton Report examined Downing Street’s use of intelligence cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair’s officials of doctoring the intelligence findings, though leaving the issue of how accurate the intelligence was unresolved.⁷² In the United States, inquiries are being pursued or demanded as to how evidence on Saddam’s weapon’s program was manipulated to justify the narrative of security.⁷³ The comparisons with other historical discourses may prove useful in time, most obviously with the case of Vietnam, when US and Australian involvement was based on another deception: that of North Vietnamese aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin. But the present study argues that the shift to the liberty discourse with that of a security debate was achieved because of an exceptional emphasis on “shared” values between Canberra and Washington, values that were promoted against terrorism as an international threat that has been normalised as other ideological threats of the Twentieth Century. The strategic environment has therefore shifted from the Cold War confrontations between capitalist and communist blocs to a modified system of alliances against ‘terrorism’, patterned along the fault lines of Islamic nations. The capture of Saddam Hussein has merely continued the self-congratulatory theme of deposing a tyrant, and it is a theme that will continue to resound as a definitive trope in the ‘war on terror.’

In the long run, the closeness of the US-Australian relationship as shown in the Iraqi invasion may actually hinder the objects of the alliance. The fear, and it is a growing one amongst the strategic community in Australia, is that Canberra risks accompanying the US in the pursuit of “unsustainable, possibly unachievable policies.”⁷⁴ One is reminded by the comments of the German political and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, when he argued that the “worst confusion arises when concepts such as justice and freedom are used to legitimise one’s own political ambitions and to disqualify or demoralise the enemy.”⁷⁵ Even if Iraq posed no significant global threat, as was soon found out, the elimination of Saddam’s regime was justified ideologically, as necessary in the broader interest of democratic civilization.

Binoy Kampmark is Hampton Scholar at Saint John's College, University of Queensland, where he tutors in political science, history and law.

Notes

Published: 1 August 2004 URL: http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/kampmark.htm