On March 20, 2003, then prime minister John Howard addressed the nation to justify Australia joining the United States-led invasion of Iraq.
He cited the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – a threat we now know was illusory. He also cited the character of Saddam Hussein’s rule.
“There are many dictatorships in the world. But this is a dictatorship of a particularly horrific kind,” he argued. “The removal of Saddam Hussein will lift this immense burden of terror from the Iraqi people.”
Sadly, that prediction too proved illusory, as the invasion ushered in years of violence, greatly increased neighbouring Iran’s influence in Baghdad and ultimately led to the apocalyptic rule of the Islamic State group in the country’s north.
Howard assured his television audience that the invasion was “fully legal under international law”, based on United Nations Security Council resolutions. Yet, the invasion had already been delayed by attempts to secure renewed Security Council backing, until Washington and its allies concluded that was impossible. Then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan would say in 2004 that the invasion “was not in conformity with the UN charter … it was illegal”.
Today, US President Donald Trump’s White House is justifying war and regime change in Iran with dubious claims of an imminent threat, and its supporters again invoke the brutal and oppressive character of Tehran’s theocracy. When Defence Minister Richard Marles was asked for Australia’s view, he said: “The legality is a matter for both United States and Israel to go through, but we support the United States in preventing Iran acquiring [nuclear weapons] capability.”
As with last year’s Operation Midnight Hammer – which Trump declared had obliterated that nuclear capability – Operation Epic Fury did not involve consultation with Canberra or Washington’s other long-term allies, much less the UN. They are simply dragged along in the US military’s wake, a coalition of the compelled.
Epic Fury is closer to a full-scale war than Midnight Hammer, leading members of the US Congress to demand a role. The legislature’s constitutional authority over waging war has long been honoured mainly in the breach. Trump is unlikely to worry.
Opposition spokesman Andrew Hastie declared the global rules-based order was dead: “I think the world is governed by power, and I prefer a powerful US re-establishing deterrence, rather than other countries like Russia … using might to advance its national interest.”
But how are Russia and other nations likely to respond to such open contempt for what US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth described as “so-called international institutions”? This year has seen the US abduct a foreign head of state, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, to muted international reaction. Now it has assassinated another, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei’s tyranny over Iran’s citizens – much like Saddam’s – does not authorise Washington or Tel Aviv to act unchecked in pursuit of their own agendas. Beyond advancing the interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia, these include sending a message to China over control of global resources ahead of Trump’s meeting with President Xi Jinping in Beijing next month, as Professor Clinton Fernandes has written in an analysis for The Age.
Around the world, smaller nations dealing with larger neighbours find their foundations have shifted. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who will address a joint sitting of parliament in Canberra on Thursday, alluded to this at Davos last month when he urged countries to “take their signs down” and acknowledge that the international system no longer “functions as advertised”. Trump’s Board of Peace is another sign of these times.
Nearly eight years ago, then foreign minister Julie Bishop told an audience at La Trobe University: “An environment where ‘might is right’ and where the rules are set by powerful nations to their advantage is obviously more susceptible to conflict … I believe the test for our generation will be whether, given the opportunity, we defended and strengthened that rules-based order that had brought unparalleled prosperity and opportunity to humanity.”
This is a test the current crop of Australian leaders seem determined to avoid. We may all have cause to lament that determination.
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