Australia joined the US-led invasion of Iraq, one of the most contentious decisions of John Howard’s prime ministership, without a formal cabinet submission setting out a full analysis of the risks.
Cabinet papers published by the National Archives on Monday show the full cabinet signed off on the decision on 18 March 2003 based on “oral reports by the prime minister”.
The record of the cabinet’s decision contains no mention of any doubt about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s continued possession of weapons of mass destruction. This key justification for the war fell away after months of failed searches after the invasion.
“The cabinet further noted that Australia’s goal in participating in any military enforcement action would be disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the document said.
A month earlier, Howard told parliament: “The Australian government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons.”
But a comprehensive US report later concluded that Iraq had destroyed its last weapons of mass destruction more than a decade before the March 2003 invasion and its capacity to build new ones had been dwindling for years.
Australia’s preparedness to join the “coalition of the willing” assembled by the then US president, George W Bush, and backed by the UK prime minister, Tony Blair, was highly controversial at the time.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Australian cities in February 2003 – a month before the formal decision – to protest against the Iraq war.
A future MP, Andrew Wilkie, resigned from the Office of National Assessments in protest on 11 March 2003. When Howard announced the government’s decision one week later, the then Labor leader, Simon Crean, said it was “a black day for Australia”.
Many of the government’s key strategic calls appear to have been made by the cabinet’s secretive national security committee (NSC), whose records have not been released.
But the cabinet documents show that Howard took the matter to his full cabinet for endorsement on 18 March 2003. This occurred without detailed paperwork.
“There was no submission to cabinet on costs, benefits and implications of Australia’s entry into the war,” associate professor David Lee from the University of NSW Canberra wrote in an essay on the 2003 cabinet papers.
“This was notwithstanding the fact that the Iraq commitment was, in Howard’s words, ‘the most controversial foreign policy decision taken by my government in the almost 12 years it held office’. This indicates that cabinet’s national security committee was the locus of decision-making on the war.”
Howard later wrote in his book Lazarus Rising: “The NSC had been meeting regularly on Iraq, but I wanted full cabinet endorsement of a final decision to commit to the invasion.”
The six-page cabinet minute from 18 March 2003 said Howard briefed his ministers on his “extensive discussions over a period of time” with Bush and Blair “concerning the disarmament of Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and the possible use of force against Iraq if it failed to disarm”.
Howard told the cabinet he had received a call from Bush earlier the same day to formally request “that Australia participate in military action by a coalition to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction”.
Bush told Howard the US would issue a “final ultimatum” to Iraq very soon. Within two days, the war was in full swing.
Ministers “noted an oral briefing” from the then chief of the ADF, Peter Cosgrove, and chief of the air force, Angus Houston, about the readiness of the Australian forces already “pre-deployed” to the Middle East.
This briefing apparently included “possible risks of military action in Iraq, including the risks to Iraqi and other civilians and to the various elements of the contingent as well as the scope for risk mitigation” – but the details are not recorded in the cabinet minute.
Ministers relied on a number of past UN security council resolutions as providing, in the words of the cabinet minute, “clear authority for the use of force against Iraq”.
But Crean and other critics argued Australia should only act if the UN security council passed a new resolution specifically authorising military action.
The UN’s then secretary general, Kofi Annan, would later describe the US-led war on Iraq as “not in conformity with the UN charter” and “illegal” under international law.
Howard’s cabinet backed the rationale that Iraq’s behaviour “weakens the global prohibitions on the spread of weapons of mass destruction, with the potential to damage gravely Australia’s security”.
Robert Hill, the defence minister at the time, recalled that the likelihood of a US military operation had been building since late 2002.
“We weren’t formally asked to participate until the last moment, but we sensed the likelihood that we would be asked, and we obviously were doing a lot of work on what that would mean and what would be the appropriate Australian contribution,” Hill said in an interview on the release of the cabinet papers.
He said he believed the government made the right decision “on the information that was available at the time”. He said Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction in the past and the issue was “whether he’d gotten rid of them”.
Asked whether it was now clear the decision was flawed, Hill said: “Now we know he didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction. Well, that would have been a different information base from which to make a decision.”
On Monday the acting Greens leader, Nick McKim, will denounce the Iraq war as “one of the worst foreign policy disasters in Australian history” and will call on the government to reform war powers.
McKim will say preventing governments from deploying the ADF to overseas conflicts without a binding vote of parliament will ensure no Australian prime minister can “repeat a mistake like Iraq without basic democratic oversight”.
