Secretive war discussion undermines public’s trust
The inner workings of John Howard’s government as it considered committing troops to the US-led war in Iraq appear destined to remain a secret forever.
Unfortunately, Australians will glean little insight into the government’s thinking leading up to the nation’s involvement in the controversial war despite this week’s release of hundreds of cabinet documents from 2003.
The most notable aspect of the trove of newly declassified records was the near total absence of information about the discussions held before Australia committing 2000 troops to the Iraq war, which was never sanctioned by the UN Security Council.
No submissions were made to cabinet, meaning the annual process of releasing documents – often redacted for security, commercial-inconfidence or other legitimate privacy concerns – has shed almost no new light.
Twenty years on and the most the documents reveal are the minutes of a verbal briefing given to cabinet ministers by then-prime minister Mr Howard hours after the US had formally requested Australia’s support for the war and only days before the invasion started.
This two-page summary reveals nothing Australians didn’t already know; that the intent was to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destructions.
Weapons, history now tells us, Iraq never possessed.
Of course, Australia did not go to war off the back of one presentation by a PM.
The substantive Iraq debate, which may or may not have included considerations about what Australia would do should the war become a protracted conflict, occurred behind closed doors in meetings of the powerful National Security Council.
Documents of those discussions remain classified, so Australians may never know if its elected government had foreseen the nation becoming embroiled in what was ultimately an almost decade-long conflict.
That the NSC was the body primarily considering any potential military action is not inherently a bad thing, but the ongoing secrecy is a blow to transparency.
The presentation to the wider cabinet happening so close to the invasion backs the popular historical view that Howard’s decision to go into Iraq was largely fuelled by a desire to deepen ties with the US.
The lack of paper trail among the 2003 cabinet documents heightens the sense that wider government approval was merely a rubber stamp.
It was a similar story last year, when records relating to cabinet deliberations from the year 2002 were released.
Despite Australia being on the cusp of engaging in two major Middle East conflicts – Iraq and Afghanistan – references to either were minimal.
A handful of verbal briefings alluded to events, including increased discussions with the US, but no detail of those conversations was revealed.
In the 2003 documents there are references to “extensive” conversations with the UK and US in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, but the report gives no sense of what information Australia’s government was making its decisions upon.
Until recently, the annual release of historic cabinet documents has mostly resulted in interesting insights into major domestic policy.
But as the process begun to capture the tumultuous global events of the early 2000s, information on foreign affairs concerns has been scant.
On Iraq, inquiries conducted in the years after the invasion found military action was taken before other options were completely exhausted, and that the US relied on false and overstated intelligence.
Cabinet records should be an opportunity to consider and scrutinise the government’s role, which has lasting effects even today.
But so far the records have revealed nothing.
Unlike in the US, UK and many other Western nations, the Australian government has no obligation to notify, consult or seek approval from parliament when going to war.
In 2023, the government passed a range of measures reforming how Australia goes to war, but this did not include a change requiring parliamentary approval.
Instead, parliamentarians would be required to rush back to Canberra as soon as possible after a government committed Australian troops to a war, but only to debate that decision.
The lack of detail decades after Iraq cannot instil public confidence in the elected officials empowered to make such a pivotal decision.