The cabinet papers released by the National Archives always keep Australian media busy on New Year’s Eve.
Often, much of what’s in the 20 year-old bundle is passé or predictable, but the 2024 release was different.
In fact, it was a non-release.
This year, 78 of the papers are said to be missing. On New Year’s Day, in a media statement, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet admitted that it had not transferred “a small number” of documents to the National Archives.
The missing papers include records from the national security committee of cabinet, where the decision to invade Iraq was made.
Among some 240 declassified papers, only a couple refer to the coming war in Iraq.
The bundle should contain evidence of how the Howard government decided to join the US’s “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq on March 18, 2003.
But it doesn’t. So who has been negligent in keeping these records, and has failed to pass them to the National Archives? Or who has suppressed, if not destroyed them? As all public servants know, removing or destroying official documents is a criminal offence under the Archives Act.
Most adult Australians remember what happened in 2003, and many joined protests against it. So did members of Parliament, including Anthony Albanese and then opposition leader Simon Crean. The Senate passed a motion opposing the Iraq war.
The Western coalition succeeded in overthrowing president Saddam Hussein.
But the invaders made as much of a mess of the occupying and rebuilding Iraq as their predecessors in Afghanistan had done, and continued to do. The attack on Baghdad inflamed the “war on terror”, committing the US and its allies to years of fighting in Iraq, and in Libya and Syria. It’s not called the “endless war” for nothing: US and other Western forces are still supposedly fighting Islamic State in Syria, and in Iraq where Australians fought until 2009.
Defence people like to talk about “lessons learnt”, but none are available in Australia from these costly, futile wars. Why not?
For four reasons.
First, because Howard’s successor Kevin Rudd failed to heed public calls to set up a public investigation, as Britain did, of how Australia got into the Iraq war. In the UK, the Chilcot Inquiry delved for six years into how Prime Minister Tony Blair connived with President George W. Bush to “fix the intelligence and facts around the policy”, as Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, described the process.
Some of Blair’s ministers, and a legal specialist in the Foreign Office, resigned over Iraq. None of their Australian counterparts did. As a result of the Chilcot report, David Cameron took a proposal for war against Syria to the Parliament, and the Commons voted against it.
Second of our unlearned lessons is that Australia unlike the UK, has no convention allowing the Parliament to decide for or against going to war. A debate can be had, and questions may be asked, about a decision the executive government has already made. But there’s no vote, so nothing changes the policy.
A Parliamentary inquiry, twice promised by Labor in opposition, into how Australia goes to war, was held in 2022-23. It recommended maintaining the status quo. That meant, as Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong both said, that the executive government would retain its “war powers” unchanged. No Australian government wants to say no to the US.
This, by the way, is the practice in Canada and New Zealand, but in few other democracies.
Efforts to circumscribe the war powers of the US president have gone on for more than a decade, and failed. Indeed, since Bush declared war on terror, Congress has enabled numerous authorisations of the use of military force, and agreed to increasing allocations of funds for them.
A third aspect of Australia learning nothing is that successive governments have silently eroded the role of the Governor-General as Commander-in-Chief. After Australia signed the 1931 Statute of Westminster, the royal prerogative for war was transferred to the Governor-General, who could ask ministers for advice about a proposed deployment of armed forces and its legality.
But prime minister John Howard had already decided early in 2002 that Australia would join the US in Iraq, without admitting this to the governor-general, Peter Hollingworth.Howard told Hollingworth that his predecessors had not been involved in past decisions that committed the ADF to war and that no involvement by him – which would have involved documentation – was necessary.
A recommendation in March 2023 from the Parliamentary committee inquiring into the deployment of Australian forces abroad involved restoring the role of the Governor-General in decisions for war, particularly in relation to conflicts that are not supported by resolution of the United Nations security council, or an invitation by a sovereign nation.
This peculiar provision, seemingly anticipating war over Taiwan, was not accepted by Mr Marles. Which does not mean that Australia has told the US it’s not available – as Menzies did in 1958 over Quemoy and Matsu – for a war over Taiwan.
A fourth reason why Australia has failed to learn from its disastrous wars is because many people and most of their elected representatives are starved of facts about them. Despite years of inquiries and court cases, nothing conclusive has emerged about ADF members’ alleged misdemeanours in Afghanistan.
Craig Stockings, as general editor of the official history about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the intervention in Timor Leste, has faced delays in Defence, Foreign Affairs, and PM&C, that seem like censorship. Peter Edwards, who edited the official war history of Vietnam, says this kind of obstruction is unprecedented.
Compare Professor Stockings’ experience with the access given to the media and the public by the Howard government to classified records on Australia and Timor Leste in the 1970s, and by the Whitlam government on the Vietnam war. But a lot has changed since 2001.
People in government who argued for the invasion of Iraq war (despite there being no UN security council resolution for it) have since retired, or have risen to top jobs in the public service, in intelligence, in universities, and as consultants on military affairs.
None has ever publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, or that the war was illegal. “Anti-terror” laws now make even inquiring about a national security matter a crime. A whole generation learned from the war on terror to tell ministers only what they would find useful in the national security committee of cabinet.
As Hugh White recalled from his days at Defence as deputy secretary: “they didn’t ask and we didn’t tell them”.
Prime Minister Albanese has told the ABC that the Morrison government should have handed over cabinet documents relating to the Iraq War, for release to the public.
We now wait through January for Dennis Richardson’s report on why, how, and when the records were suppressed. Properly done, it could be the Chilcot inquiry Australia never had. But for the results of Rex Patrick’s freedom-of-information applications to the National Archives and to PM&C, we may be waiting longer.
