Australian parliament in row over Iraq

Australian News.Net
Tuesday 17th October, 2006

The Australian parliament was in uproar Monday as opposition parliamentarians applied the blowtorch to Prime Minister John Howard.

The issue was Iraq, and Australia's involvement in the Iraq war.

Howard committed Australia to the March 2003 invasion on the basis Saddam Hussein was developing and harboring weapons of mass destruction. Australia's contribution was a token 2,000 troops, but it added credibility for the case waged by the United States and Britain as to the need for war.

Australia's Opposition Leader Kim Beazley took centre stage in the Parliament in Canberra Monday when he accused the Howard government of going to war with Iraq on the basis of, 'a lie.'

In moving a censure motion against the government, he said Australia's involvement had made Australia less safe from terrorism and that the battle in Iraq was now an ethnic fight that Australian and U.S. troops could not resolve.

'There is nobody in the United States administration, in the British administration, in the leadership of the United States administration through to the leadership of the British administration, and I dare say the civil servants, the public servants that advise this Government, who now believe that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do,' Mr Beazley told Parliament.

'The whole panoply of disasters that has surrounded this war has put those of us in the West, struggling for a decent outcome to protect ourselves and to encourage a victory for mainstream Muslims all on the back foot.'

Mr Beazley said Mr Howard had undermined Australia's national security by making it a bigger terrorism target through the nation's involvement in Iraq.

Prime Minister Howard responded by saying Mr Beazley's policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq, 'would give an enormous boost to the terrorist cause, not only in the Middle East but also in our part of the world'.

'That is the central failure of the Leader of the Opposition's speech. He has not explained, let alone justified, how the policies that he advocates could in any way make this country safer,' Mr Howard said.

Opposition Leader Beazley plans to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq, if elected in the national vote next year.

'We must withdraw our troops in Iraq,' he told Tara Daley of Channel 10 on Saturday. 'It was the wrong war. It's not made us safer, in fact it's made the world far less safe, the fact that we're involved there.'

'I would give notice immediately to our American allies and our other friends on coming in that we have other priorities now and the troops will be coming out - they'll get that on day one.'

'I strongly opposed the war when it commenced,' he said. 'I thought this is the wrong war in the wrong place and it will not diminish the threat of Islamic fundamentalists terrorism. It will actually increase it and provide a distraction for the United States which will suck the oxygen out of its foreign policy, and all sorts of other problems will emerge as a result of that.'

'I haven't seen a single thing happen in the last three years which would suggest that I got that wrong,' he said. 'I've got that right. And I'm getting it right, now in terms of what our priorities ought to be. I love the way John Howard and the others say: "Well look, you might think that we did the wrong thing in going in there, but trust us that we've got the right answers when we say we're going to stay now". No. John, you got it wrong in the first place, you're getting it wrong now, time you moved over.'

The Australian government hit back Tuesday with the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, telling Parliament Labor's plan was a weak and gutless policy.

"The leader of the Opposition's proposition is that this great country would pullout its forces and ask others to do the job for us," he said.

"He would go to our allies, the Americans, and the morally bankrupt way the leader of the Opposition proposes, and say to the Americans 'find someone else to do this job we are too weak to continue with it'."

Labor's foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd however retaliated saying the Iraq war was the single greatest foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War.

"Mr Downer, I presume, is proud of the fact that 50,000 Iraqi civilians lie dead since the invasion of March 2003, Mr Downer is proud of the fact that 100 Iraqi civilians are killed each day in Iraq, he's proud of the fact that this has involved the expenditure of $1.9 billion of Australian taxpayers funding without any exit strategy in sight," Rudd said.

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