Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

You don't have to be mad, but it helps

Some 40 years ago a member of the Australian parliament, the late William Charles Wentworth, made a speech in which he advocated the immediate nuking of Beijing, or Peking as it was then known. As happened more often than not with the somewhat eccentric politician, his fellow MPs looked knowingly at each other and made surreptitious remarks about the phases of the moon; on the subject of foreign affairs, and particularly Communist China, Wentworth was generally considered to be barking mad.

But perhaps, as was often the case with domestic matters such as the standard rail gauge and indigenous affairs, Wentworth was merely ahead of his time. His point, which would be widely embraced by today's government, was that such a pre-emptive strike was necessary to prevent Mao and his followers from developing weapons of mass destruction.

There was, however, a difference, which was that Wentworth, while a trifle extreme, was undoubtedly sincere. The same cannot be said of his successors among the so-called Coalition of the Willing.

For the Americans, there were many cogent reasons for invading Iraq. For the seriously ideological neo-conservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz it was akin to a holy war: as fanatical supporters of Zionism, they saw the remaking of the Middle East as something close to the final battle of Armageddon, and if it had much the same result, well, that was just God's will.

For the more pragmatic members of the military-industrial complex led by Dick Cheney, it was an opportunity to secure Iraq's oil reserves, a matter which was becoming urgent as the unrest in Saudi Arabia increased and the future of American supplies from that country looked more uncertain. For George Dubya himself it was the chance to finish off a vendetta; Saddam Hussein was, after all, the man who tried to kill his daddy.

The aims of all three involved not just regime change, as it is delicately called, but outright conquest. Unfortunately this was never going to be acceptable to the rest of the world, or even to most of the populations of Britain and Australia at least; even in the post-September 11 United States it would have been a very hard sell. Thus, as Wolfowitz has admitted, the fall back to the line about ridding the world of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, whether or not they actually existed.

The threat was bodgied up with everything from highly suspect sources such as an American student's thesis to outright forgeries like the Nigerian uranium order form. And in case it still wasn't quite scary enough, Tony Blair informed us that the dreaded WMDs could be deployed within 45 minutes and Don Rumsfeld insisted that there were clear links between Baghdad and Al Qaeda. Neither of these statements was true, but the whole package was received with enthusiasm - so much so, in fact, that a very substantial group of Americans now believe that stocks of WMDs have been found in Iraq and a smaller number think they were used by Saddam during the war.

Meanwhile, back in Australia the John Howard-Alexander Downer-Robert Hill coalition of the swilling have been following the script so diligently that they appear to have been adding their own creative touches; Howard has discovered a trailer that was used as a mobile biological weapons plant at a time when both Washington and London are sheepishly admitting that the trailers they had promoted as such were almost certainly nothing of the kind.

And as the facades crack across the world, Canberra stands firm in the ever more preposterous claim that all its intelligence about the imminent threat from WMDs was absolutely unequivocal and that this threat was the sole reason for committing troops - some of whom, General Tommy Franks has now revealed, were actually engaged in operations in Iraq while Howard was still maintaining the fiction that no decision had been taken about Australia's participation in the war.

But of course WMDs had no more to do with Howard's decision than they did with Bush's. The real reason for our Prime Minister's eagerness to become the man of steel was far more traditional.

Back in 1969 I asked the then deputy Prime Minister, John McEwen, just why Australia had got itself in the disastrous Vietnam adventure. Was it really to save the south from communism, to prevent the fall of the south-east Asian dominoes with vulnerable little Australia at the end of the line? Of course not, the old man scoffed: none of the Menzies cabinet believed that nonsense for a moment, although they had to keep up the pretence. The war was all about keeping the Americans on side, that and nothing more. That was the Realpolitik of it.

And a generation later, nothing has changed except the lies: instead of the red menace and the yellow peril, we now have WMDs and terrorism. And most of us either still fall for it, or simply don't care. Even in his last days, William Charles Wentworth was never as mad as that.