Abetz and Iraqi public opinion

Max Atkinson

One would expect any fresh government attempts to justify Iraq policy to attract attention. Not so the media release from Senator Abetz , published as a Mercury letter on June 26, calling for Australians to take pride in ‘our contribution’ to the political and material reconstruction, and declaring that 77% of Iraqis now believe the war was ‘worth it’.
These claims are tendentious and the latter, if true, must raise problems for all war critics. So far they have been ignored, although they raise the same issues of misrepresentation first addressed by Andrew Wilkie in his “Axis of Deceit”.

A brief call to the Senator’s office threw no light on their factual basis, only that they came from Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, whose advisers found them in polls published months earlier. Like most Iraqi reports and estimates, these findings are recorded by the US Brookings Institution, which also records (indirectly) the massive destruction wrought by the US on Iraq’s water, sewage and power infrastructure; on its schools, roads, bridges, dams and other public works. Given air superiority and smart bomb technology, the scale of violence seems inexplicable, a tribute to the ‘shock and awe’ campaign. It is also a reminder that we are talking about restoring works and services comprehensively destroyed by the Coalition in an illegal and unjustified war.

The senator finds progress in reports that there are more cars, mobile phones, schools and internet cafes than last year, but ignores the evidence that major services remain crippled, with chronic failures in power and water. He also ignores the fact, obvious to all who watch the news, that residents of major cities must risk lives to take children to school, shop at markets, pray in mosques or visit relatives by bus. The reality is one of crisis and incipient civil war, with hundreds killed weekly in murderous vendettas. The official claims of progress seem bizarre and perverse given this continuing increase in the level of sectarian and insurgent violence.

They are also controversial claims; they are rejected in the June Quarterly Report by the prestigious US Centre for Strategic and International Studies: “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq: Fact, Fallacy and an Overall Grade of “F”. This study, available online from Iraqanalysis.org, has been backed by other independent research bodies, including the Global Policy Forum, which has a special consultative status with the UN.

The most controversial Abetz claim is another attempt to justify the war after the fact. This is the claim that 77% of Iraqis see the overthrow of Saddam as “worth it,” which is based on a poll taken six months earlier by World Public Opinion.org., a recent spin off from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). It must, however, be read in light of the finding, by the same poll, that 47%, almost half the Iraq public, thinks that violence against the Coalition is morally justified. That figure, ignored by the US media and by Abetz, is astonishing, but accords with earlier Coalition polls showing Iraqis see it as an occupying army; the latter polls, which belie US efforts to portray Iraqi resistance as foreign terrorism, are no longer released.

A closer look is instructive: “Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the US-British invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?” (emphasis added). One might more simply ask if those polled are pleased to be rid of Saddam, for the question does not differentiate the view that Iraq is better off without this monster (over 80%), from a judgment that the Coalition was right to launch an armed invasion, killing tens of thousands of Iraqis and laying waste hospitals, schools, vast public works and a priceless cultural heritage; not to mention Abu Grhaib, the massive detentions and ill-treatment of civilians, and the present escalating violence and anarchy.

This point is supported by other findings in the same poll that 70/80% either disapprove in principle of US non-military assistance or think the US is doing a poor job, in every listed category, including economic assistance, security training, mediation between sectarian groups, restoring the oil industry and repair of infrastructure. Again, while 87% want a time set for withdrawal, only 23% thinks the US will go if asked – 80% now see it as a permanent occupying force. Other polls show only 1% thinks the US adds to security. Iraqis clearly need the funds and want UN assistance, but the only support for the Coalition is from Kurds who see it, perhaps naively, as a means to pursue their aim of a separate nation.

It is hard to avoid concluding that the Senator’s optimism, like the war itself, is indifferent to the fate of Iraqis; like the Coalition policy of not recording Iraqi deaths in both Gulf wars, a policy whose intrinsic inhumanity is rarely noted. When, in August 2004, Mark Davis of SBS Dateline asked the Foreign Minister about Iraqi losses (the first journalist to do so), Downer was visibly upset and angry – he had no idea and no one had thought to brief him; but he knew it was a matter most people would, on reflection, consider relevant. Even now Coalition nations will not discuss compensation for Iraqis whose lives and limbs were sacrificed in a war fought, so we said, to save the West from Saddam’s WMD. To ignore these duties of compassion and justice is clearly wrong; it is also the kind of wrong likely to serve a Jihadist terrorism.

The fact that Iraqis have achieved so much despite the violence and occupation (re-building roads, schools and hospitals) does not refute the above polls, nor in any degree mitigate or justify the war itself as some apologists, including The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen and the Mercury’s Piers Akerman, regularly intimate. Like the high turnout for elections, this is a tribute to Iraqi resilience, not US benefaction. The fact that US support is governed by US interests not Iraqi needs (much less any sense of moral duty) was made clear by President Bush in May, when he announced that there would be no more funds for reconstruction. As a spokesman put it, the aim was not to restore Iraq but to ‘jump start’ re-building; the Iraqis could do the rest themselves.

Misrepresenting Iraqi opinion to justify war after the fact is bad enough; more disturbing is a capacity, which the government shares with regressive interpretations of Christianity and Islam, to defer basic human values to political, sectarian or national interests. This is most striking, and certainly shameful, in the Howard/Downer claim that the ‘US alliance’, with its implicit security and trading benefits, is a background justification for war. The claim ignores the ethical foundations of a law of nations which Aquinas, Suarez, Grotius and other scholars find in a far more basic and inclusive morality, requiring respect for the lives of all.

Because war entails the willful killing of vast numbers of innocent people, it cannot be used to pursue any nation’s interests; the idea that our values constrain such aims is, after all, what most people mean when they say the end cannot justify the means. The same idea that common values of justice and respect for life must take priority over national interests is what makes international law both possible and necessary.

Max Atkinson is a former teacher, Law School, University of Tasmania. Interests in jurisprudence, moral theory and political argument.