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October 7, 2004
The news reports are carrying a story saying that the top US arms inspector has reported that he found no evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991. Saddam Hussein's weapons capability was weakened during a dozen years of UN sanctions before the US invasion in 2003; Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war began; and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing.
So Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West.
So says Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.
Our intelligence said otherwise, John Howard responded on Radio National Breakfast this morning. The Prime Minister added that he had acted in good faith on the basis of that intelligence. Well, that intelligence from the US and the UK was dead wrong. It did not even come close to the truth of the matter. However we know that the the Defence Intelligence Organisation advised that Iraq could only have limited, degraded stocks of WMD; not enough to constitute a significant threat.
The prewar justifications for invading Iraq, which centered largely on the contention that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, are without foundation.
What the Duelfer Report also says is that the U.N. sanctions that prevented Saddam Hussein from getting the materials neeeded for his weapons of mass destruction programme; Hussein intended to reconstitute weapons of mass destruction programs if he were freed of UN sanctions; that Hussein had hindered and evaded international inspectors to preserve his weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
Iraq did not pose a serious threat to Australia. Hence the war was not a just one.
Meanwhile, the PM is continuing to run fiction that the war in Iraq is the centre of the war of the war on terrorism. Evoking 'national security' in relaton to Iraq (eg. its terrorist threats to us) is meaningless. The job national security is really doing is to evoke fear within the Australian people--and then harness it as part of a huge fear campign run by the Coalition to retain power.
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Re Australia's involvement in Iraq. Indeed there may not have been evidence for WMD in Iraq after 1991. However, I am glad I have not had to live under a ruler like Sudam. Was it unjust to bring the dictator and his team to some form of Justice? How many citizens of a nation have to be murdered by its ruler before independent nations like Australia step in to stop the bloodshed?