No democratic oversight of the power to wage war

"I was struck by the force of the language used in the American national intelligence assessment late in November 2002. It brought together all the American intelligence and paragraph after paragraph, they said, we judge Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." However, as evidence emerged that there were no weapons of mass destruction, he sought to explain the government's decision. "I felt embarrassed, I did, I couldn't believe it, because I had genuinely believed it," he told Albrechtsen., "So, I felt embarrassed and I did my best to explain … that it wasn't a deliberate deception. It may have been an erroneous conclusion based on the available information but it wasn't made up."

So the WMD claim may have been wrong but he himself believed it and acted in good faith. He could not, of course, know if the Americans were lying but was impressed by their confidence in the need for war. It had never occurred to him they might be wrong. Nor could he believe that Bush, by then a personal and family friend, might lie to him, or might have been lied to by Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose motives were controversial from the beginning. The naivete evident in this account seems so out of character that many critics have found it easier to question his honesty.

But, as noted above, the case for parliamentary oversight is not merely that a PM might be less than trustworthy - it is more likely that an honest leader anxious to protect the nation might be persuaded by false claims, especially when made by a powerful ally who has made it clear it would be offended if they were challenged.

One puzzle is Howard's failure to mention the role of Defence Minister Alexander Downer. One would expect them to have consulted almost daily in the weeks preceding the invasion. The explanation emerged in July 2007, when Phillip Coorey, Chief Political Correspondent of the SMH, revealed that Downer had a different view of the war. Under the title "Downer admits safety of oil key to Iraq war," he reported that the Foreign Minister had contradicted the PM, saying the mission in Iraq is linked to safeguarding the war-torn nation's oil reserves."

As Downer saw it, allowing al-Qaeda to prevail would affect Iraq's oil industry and cripple the country economically. "They have to be able to generate some income in Iraq," he said. "The suggestion that the Iraqis shouldn't be able to export oil and generate any income to sustain an economy which has already been attacked by terrorists is pretty absurd."

Downer continued in this altruistic vein, saying the challenge "is to make sure, first and foremost, al-Qaeda is defeated in Iraq", but this could not be separated from the issue of oil. "Iraq has very little going for it except its oil reserves and it has to be able to earn revenue from oil," he said. "Al-Qaeda have spent a good deal of time trying to destroy Iraq's one export-earning … capacity - blowing up pipelines in the North and trying to destroy oil facilities down in the South around Basra." Hence denying Iraq the capacity to export oil would "just completely destroy the whole of Iraq". It would also, of course, deny access to this oil by the West.

This difference over what the war was about, despite both having access to the same US policy information and intelligence estimates, is another reason to support parliamentary oversight. Howard saw himself as acting in accordance with international law (despite 43 opinions from Australian legal experts to the contrary) but refused to release his legal advice. Downer, it seems, was prepared to ignore the basic precepts of international law.

There are lessons to re-learn from the abuses of power which led to the Iraq war. Foremost is a reminder of the fallibility and hubris of political leaders. There are also cultural factors - history, education, economics, etc., which shape the views of the public and the mood of the nation. But the latter is always subject to the power of persuasion, shared between the public and private media. Howard knew that only 6% supported the war but that once Australian troops were in action this would change, as it did.

This was not the first time since the Second World War that Australia joined US wars against third-world countries based on false claims. Vietnam is a compelling example, as proved by the Pentagon Papers and the memoirs of its chief architect, the US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. Much the same story has emerged in recent years from studies of the Korean conflict, exemplified by Australian author Michael Pembroke's insightful and scholarly "Korea - where the American Century began."

The Labor Party, despite its qualified opposition to the war, has much to answer for. After twenty years of official inquiries and expert evidence of the need for parliamentary oversight, it chose not to make a submission on the proposed reforms, but to set up yet another inquiry to look into the matter. Its media release on 14 April confirms it will kick the can as far down the road as it can:

"National Conference resolves that an Albanese Labor Government will refer the issue of how Australia makes decisions to send service personnel into international armed conflict to an inquiry to be conducted by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade. This inquiry would take submissions, hold public hearings, and produce its findings during the term of the 47th Parliament."

This is deeply misleading because the issue has been researched and analysed to death in dozens of commissioned reports and hundreds of articles both here and overseas. It is also a simple question of political principle - whether the lives of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent people, including our own defence force personnel, should be put in jeopardy because government leaders assume they will not be misled by the leaders of nations with whom we share trade relations and defence treaties.

That risk is seen in the discretionary wars, based on controversial claims, which led Australia to join the US in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. They are compelling evidence of the need for Parliament to have the power necessary to examine such claims in future. This seems so obvious that many critics think Labor's do-nothing policy rests on little more than a wish to deny the Greens credit for a long-overdue reform.

With an election due in May the public is still waiting for Albanese, Wong, Shorten, Plibersek, Burke, Keneally, Dreyfus and other leaders of the federal Labor Party to come out from the non-committal world of shadow ministers and explain why a prime minister should have the kind of military power we normally associate with a medieval monarch or a totalitarian state.