 Honourable John Howard OMAC, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests. I'm Michael Fully Love, Executive Director of the Lowe Institute and it's a great pleasure to welcome you here this evening to this address to the Institute by the former Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, on the topic of Iraq 2003, a retrospective. It had been my intention to welcome you to the Bly Street officers of the Lowe Institute. In the end we made a decision to change venues because we were determined not to be cowed by an anti-democratic minority who wanted to prevent Mr. Howard from speaking. Perhaps I can put it this way, the Lowe Institute is not for turning. There are many different views of course of the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War. At the Lowe Institute we believe it is important to hear from the leader who made the decision to take Australia into it and I am grateful that Mr. Howard accepted my invitation to make what is his first major speech on Iraq since leaving office. I was determined to make good on my end of the bargain. We decided to hold the speech tonight on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to US forces. It was a moment of early optimism captured famously in the image of Saddam's statue being torn down in Firdus statue on the 9th of April. I think it's fair to say that the statue put up almost as much resistance to being toppled as the rest of Saddam's regime put together. It is a measure of the difficult days that followed that while some Iraqis celebrate today as Liberation Day, others commemorate it as Occupation Day. For Australia it is impossible to divorce our decision to participate in the war from our alliance relationship with the United States. Under Mr. Howard that relationship reached an unprecedented level of intimacy not least because of the terrorist attacks on America on the 11th of September 2001. Mr. Howard was of course in Washington on the day of those attacks and in the wake of them he became the first Australian Prime Minister to invoke the ANZUS Treaty. He later took us into that war which had very significant implications both for America and for the world. Before I introduce Mr. Howard a few housekeeping matters. First of all this is a public event. It's being recorded for the media and for distribution on our website. Secondly you are welcome to tweet the event if you wish. Mr. Howard I don't imagine that Twitter is your thing but for those in the audience who are on Twitter the hashtag for this evening is John Howard Iraq one word. Ladies and gentlemen John Winston Howard born the 26th of July 1939 served as Australia's 25th Prime Minister between March 1996 and November 2007. He was the nation's second longest Prime Minister and a member of the Australian Parliament for 33 years. Mr. Howard is a companion of the Order of Australia and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the highest civilian award in the United States by his comrade in the Iraq War President George W. Bush. In January 2012 Queen Elizabeth II appointed Mr. Howard to the Order of Merit. Ladies and gentlemen I am very pleased indeed to invite John Howard to address the Lowy Institute on Iraq 2003 a retrospective. Mr. Howard. Thank you very much Dr. Fuller Love. Before I address the issue of Iraq I can't let this occasion go by without paying tribute to the remarkable life of Margaret Hilda Thatcher the just deceased Prime Minister of Great Britain a towering figure not just on the conservative side of politics but somebody who achieved the real mark of a great leader and that is having changed permanently for the better not only her own country but in partnership in my view with Ronald Reagan and the late Pope John Paul II was quite instrumental in bringing about the fall of Soviet communism which is the most transformative political event in my lifetime and I would suggest the lifetime of anybody in this room and I therefore pay a very warm tribute to her contribution I believe we are in different ways greatly in her debt. I want to thank the Lowy Institute if I can put it that way for the opportunity of revisiting the most controversial decision that my government took in the almost 12 years that it was in office but before I tackle the substance of that issue I want to pay tribute to the men and women of the Australian Defence Force who served in Iraq theirs was a dangerous mission and although mercifully we suffered no battle deaths many were wounded and I am conscious of the impact of that engagement on their lives. Can I also particularly acknowledge the presence here tonight of Mori McNaan who was the first commander of our forces in Iraq, of General Jim Moulin who became chief of operations under General Casey and had responsibility for some 350,000 coalition forces, General Ken Gillespie, former vice chief of the Defence Force and also a member of the Lowy Institute staff Captain James Brown who was a member of the Al-Matana task group who I had the opportunity of saying hello on a visit to southern Iraq in 2006. I left the Prime Minister's ship of this country with a lasting respect for the men and women of the ADF. They are an ornament to Australia and although the level of engagement in Iraq was vastly different from our commitment in Vietnam I'm immensely grateful that when our men and women returned to Iraq they were not subjected to the criticism and abuse that was laid at many men who served in Vietnam and quite rightly the criticism was directed from those who disagreed with their mission to those who were responsible namely the political leaders at the time. As they rightly say context is everything and as I go back over the events of 10 years ago that is certainly something to be kept in mind. Early in 2003 the world still lived in the shadow of the 11th of September. The United States had entered a new phase of profound vulnerability and remained preoccupied with when and where the next terrorist attack on her homeland would occur. The notion of an Arab spring was unsinkable and here in Australia we had just felt the full force of Islamic extremism in Bali almost as if it had been on our own soil and we had begun to embrace tough new anti-terrorism laws designed to smother threats to our peaceful society. The 9-11 attacks challenged our normal understanding of international threats and conflict. They had not inaugurated a conventional war, no ultimatum had been delivered and no armies had rolled across borders as they had done as recently as in 1991 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. It was a world away from the Cold War when mutually assured destruction spawned a nervous peace. This was new and different and because of its scale impact and sheer audacity the stunning success of the attacks unnerved Americans and many others. Reflecting that new dimension an American president said and I quote the greatest threat to US and global security is no longer a nuclear exchange between nations but nuclear terrorism by violent extremists. Another American president said and I quote our greatest fear is that when terrorists will find a short cut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale. When uttering those words the two presidents were expressing a common American dread, doubtless entertained by millions of their fellow countrymen and women. The first statement belonged to President Obama, the second to former President George W. Bush. They spoke eight years apart but their respective words could easily have been spoken by the other and from the same platform as they expressed a like fear. The terrorist attacks of the 11th of September 2001 were a greater violation of the American homeland than Pearl Harbor. They produced amongst Americans an unaccustomed sense of vulnerability which would last years. Vulnerability is a counterintuitive concept when it comes to the United States. How can the most powerful nation the world has seen ever feel vulnerable? Yet it did after September 2001 and also importantly for Australia, commensurately grateful for friends. Only in the absence of further attacks on America at home has that vulnerability gradually dissipated. Yet central to a proper understanding of why the US acted as she did over Iraq and the implications that had for a close ally such as Australia is to recognize that vulnerability. Americans thought their country would be attacked by terrorists again and soon. To many in the United States why wouldn't a rogue state like Iraq supply dangerous weapons to terrorist groups? Why wouldn't there be further plane hijackings? And at the next time a hijack plane headed for a tall building it might contain a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon. Such sentiments doubtless seem exaggerated today. They certainly didn't in the United States in the immediate wake of 9-11. That no further attacks took place either during the remaining years, seven years of the Bush presidency or the four years so far of President Obama's presidency is greatly to the credit of both men. Little that credit has been forthcoming. The anxiety of the early years has given way to a growing complacency that it won't happen again. So much of the narrative about Iraq has focused on what has been depicted as an ill-founded obsession regarding that country by George Bush and those close to him. Certainly Iraq was never far from their minds. Within hours of the 9-11 attacks I recall Australia's then ambassador to the United States Michael Thorling saying to me that he thought that Iraq would be back on the agenda for the Americans. Yet to understand the American mindset about Iraq is to recognize that if there were an obsession about Iraq then it was a bipartisan one. To the Clinton administration removing Saddam was unfinished business. On his watch the Iraq Liberation Act was passed. It expressly called for regime change in Baghdad. In 1998 Bill Clinton declared and I quote the world had to deal with the kind of threat Iraq poses a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction ready to use them or pass them to terrorists who travel the world among us unnoticed. End of quote. Those words could easily have been uttered by George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld. The belief that Saddam was a threat to the region and beyond and should be removed crossed the aisle in American politics. It was little wonder therefore that senior figures in the Obama administration such as Hillary Clinton and the vice president Joe Biden when US senators voted in favor of military action against Saddam. Australia's decision to join the coalition in Iraq was a product both of our belief at the time that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the nature of our relationship and alliance with the United States. I never believed that Saddam was involved in the 9-11 attacks nor in my view did President Bush or to my knowledge Tony Blair such a claim never formed part of the public case put by the Howard government for our Iraqi involvement. Some sections of the American administration may have had this conviction. It did not influence the Australian decision-making process. He may not have been involved in 9-11 but Saddam had a grizzly track record. He had used poison gas against the Iranians and the Kurds, gave $25,000 to every family of a Palestinian suicide bomber, was classified by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism, was responsible for up to 100,000 dead in the Anfel campaign of 1988 against the Kurds. His 1991 campaign of reprisals against the Shia claimed 50,000 lives between 600,000 and 1 million died in the Iraq-Iran war. His human rights record was unspeakable and the claims of some that life in Iraq was better under Saddam than it has been since defy belief. The belief that Saddam had WMDs was near universal. As the flood inquiry established by my government into the pre-war intelligence said, and I quote, prior to the 19th of March 2003, the only government in the world that claimed that Iraq was not working on and did not have biological and chemical weapons or prohibited missile systems was the government of Saddam Hussein, end of quote. Critics of what my government did, ranging from Jacques Chirac to Kevin Rudd, all a bird that Saddam had WMDs. The latter famously told the State Zionist Council of Victoria late in 2002 that it was quote an empirical fact that the Iraqis possessed WMDs. To drive the point home he even said that this was based on a report of the Federation of American Scientists, a group which many of you will know grew out of the Manhattan Project, that is work on the first atomic bomb. Hard though it is now for many to accept, the party political divide in Australia in the lead up to the military operation in Iraq was not over the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Rather it was whether or not a further resolution of the United Nations explicitly authorizing the use of force should be obtained as a precondition to Australia committing forces. Several times Simon Crane, Labor's then leader, said that if such a resolution were passed by the Security Council he would support Australian involvement. Given the dynamics of the Security Council then this meant that if France and Russia changed their positions then the Labor opposition in Australia would also change its. Those two countries were the permanent members really standing in the way of a further resolution for their own political reasons not because they did not believe Saddam had weapons. I was convinced after a discussion I had late in 2002 with the influential former Premier of China Lee Peng when he visited to mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and China that Barack was certainly not a deal breaker for the Chinese and if the Russians and the French shifted Beijing would have waived the resolution through. The debate in Australia did bring about quite sharp focus on the different attitudes towards the United Nations. There were those on the one hand what I might loosely call the supreme multilateralists who abided absolutely by the UN book. If the Security Council said yes then all was in order. If the Security Council refused to or had not endorsed something then it must not occur and on the other hand there were those who believed that nations had the right to exercise a value judgment independently of the world body when the circumstances warranted. There have as you know been a number of recent cases of member states side stepping UN deliberations in apprehension of the veto being used to frustrate their intentions. Kosovo was a clear example. NATO countries never put this to the test before the Security Council knowing that a Russian veto would emerge because of Moscow's traditional friendship with Belgrade. They simply began their anti-Serbian bombing campaign. It succeeded. Milosevic fell. The Balkans were a markedly better place and the world was largely happy yet it was not endorsed by the United Nations. I acknowledge that not all of those who opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom did so because they thought there was insufficient United Nations authority for the action to be taken or because they did not believe Iraq had WMDs. One such group with a so called realists who included some senior Republican figures identified with President George H.W. Bush and in particular Brent Scowcroft National Security Advisor to the 41st President and a mentor to Condi Rice. The realists were probably untroubled by the UN issue, likely believed Saddam had WMDs and regarded him as a loathsome dictator. Despite this they saw merit in continuing a policy of containing him and a skewing resort to military action. To them the world was too dangerous a place to become involved in such action except in the most compelling circumstances which they did not think existed in Iraq in 2003. In other words they largely shared the Bush administration's assessment of the threat but differed as to the most appropriate response. In the light of what happened after the invasion, they of all groups might have felt entitled to point the finger and say I told you so. Yet their attitude was open to criticism on two counts. To start with Saddam was not being contained. Until George Bush wound up the pressure on the United Nations to return weapons inspectors to Iraq late in 2002, Saddam had been thumbing his nose at the world body and its various strictures on him. The UN sanctions regime and the accompanying no-fly zones over Iraq were coming under increasing strain and were most likely unsustainable in the long term. The other flaw was that the realist approach did not in any way accommodate the huge psychological shift in American attitudes following 9-11. A policy of relaxed containment might have worked prior to the terrorist attacks in the changed atmosphere of vulnerability when Americans genuinely thought another attack on their homeland was only a matter of time and action might be taken to preempt it. Containment must have seemed to many oddly passive. My government never saw the obtaining of a fresh security council resolution as a necessary legal prerequisite to action to remove Saddam. It was always our view that resolution 678, dating back to 1990, provided sufficient legal grounds for the action ultimately taken. That was reflected in the formal legal advice tender to the government and subsequently tabled in federal parliament. By contrast there was great political value, especially for the British government fighting much internal British Labor Party resistance if an explicit authorization for military action were obtained. And I have no doubt that one of the driving forces behind the decision of President Bush to go to the United Nations in September of 2002 was to accommodate the political challenges by his close ally Tony Blair and bear in mind that in the ultimate the British committed at peak something in the order of 45,000 troops to the operation in Iraq and Bush's concern about Blair's political position was thoroughly understandable. To have tried albeit unsuccessfully for a new resolution added weight to the moral and political case being built for a military operation. The Clinton administration thought that 678 gave blanket legal coverage for all the military action it took to enforce the terms of that resolution and there was wide acceptance of that view, including in Australia. When Australia agreed at President Clinton's request to send special forces to the Gulf in 1998 to support Operation Desert Thunder by the Americans and the British against Saddam's WNB capacity as well as other strategic assets of the regime because of another round of defiance of UN resolutions. The Australian opposition readily concurred. Kim Beasley accompanied me to Campbell Barracks to farewell the men and we were as one on the correctness of their mission. The late June Kirk Patrick addressing the American Enterprise Institute in June 2003 told of a conversation she'd had with Richard Holbrook since deceased when he said and I quote three times Clinton did what many Democrats are now saying Bush can't do. He did it in Bosnia in 95 in Iraq with Desert Fox in December of 98 and in Kosovo in 99 in the Balkans case he had no Security Council authority. A constant argument against our participation in the coalition of the willing was the claim made repeatedly that it would increase the likelihood of a terrorist attack on Australia. My response then was that Australia had been a terrorist target for several years before Iraq. Bin Laden's first belligerent reference to us had been in the context of the liberation of East Timor which was in 1999 and an act which had widespread support in the Australian community. I have never taken a cavalier approach to terrorist threats and no credible guarantees can ever be given by any government that Australia is immune from such attacks. However the evidence to date is that our security services, our strengthened laws and an alert populace have combined to provide effective guardianship. Another criticism at the time was the joining the Americans and the British in Iraq would permanently damage us in the eyes of the Muslim world and in particular Indonesia the most populace Muslim country of all. I was particularly sensitive to this issue and that is why I played a special visit to then President Megawati in February 2003 to explain to her that if Australia did go into Iraq our action should be seen as part of an international effort to disarm Iraq and not anti-Islamic in character. She made it clear that she accepted this and there is no evidence that our involvement in Iraq damaged our relationship with Indonesia both through the close relationship that I personally forged with SBY and in other ways Australia and Indonesia grew closer in the years after 2003 and it was legitimate of me to claim when I left office in 2007 or rather office left me that the bilateral relationship had never been in better shape. The military operation against Iraq was speedy and effective much more than most had expected and in that context I recall a discussion I had a few days after the operation started with Airhood Barak the former Israeli Prime Minister and the most decorated soldier ever in the Israeli Defense Forces and it will recently the Israeli Defense Minister. He told me that he expected that the military operation then underway against Saddam would require tenacious hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Baghdad before being successfully concluded and in that same discussion he expressed little doubt that Iraq possessed WMDs. After the fall of Saddam and when it became apparent that stockpiles of WMDs had to me unexpectedly not been found in Iraq it was all too easy for many people who only months earlier had said Iraq had the weapons to begin claiming that Australia had gone to war based on a lie. That claim is the most notorious one of all about the conduct of my government and of other governments and merits the most empathic rejection. Not only does it impugn the integrity of the decision making process at the highest level but also the professionalism and integrity of intelligence agencies here and elsewhere. Some of the key assessments proved to be wrong but that is a world away from those assessments being the product of deceit and or political manipulation. In Australia there were two inquiries there was a parliamentary inquiry as well as the flood inquiry which canvassed the pre-war intelligence. In its submission to the former ONA said and I quote ONA said in a report of the 31st of January 2003 that there is a wealth of intelligence on Saddam's WMD activities but it paints a circumstantial picture that is conclusive overall rather than resting on a single piece of irrefutable evidence. The Defence Intelligence Organization said in its submission to the same inquiry and I quote again Iraq probably retained a WMD capability even if that capability had been degraded over time. DIO also assessed that Iraq maintained both an intent and capability to recommence a wider program should circumstances permitted to do so. The flood inquiry found and I quote no evidence of politicization of the assessments on Iraq either overt or perceived or that quoting again any analyst or manager was the subject of either direct or implied pressure to come to a particular judgment on Iraq for policy reasons or to bolster the case for war. Flood further said and I quote again assessments reflected reasonably the available evidence and used intelligent sources with appropriate caution. Flood said that the obverse conclusion that Iraq had no WMDs quoting again would have been a much more difficult conclusion to substantiate. Neither inquiry gave a scaric of support to the proposition that members of my government had manufactured convenient intelligence or strong arm to the agencies into saying things they did not believe. The national intelligence assessment of October 2002 which was declassified in July 2003 gives some idea of the strength of the intelligence advice coming to the United States and her allies such as Australia and NIA is a distillation of the views of all the American intelligence agencies including the CIA. Its key judgments were as follows we judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. If left unchecked it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade. We judge that we are only seeing a portion of Iraq's WMD efforts owing to Baghdad's vigorous denial and deception efforts. Revelations after the Gulf War starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information. We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD programs. Since inspections ended in 1998 Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort energized its missile program and invested more heavily in biological weapons. In the view of most agencies Baghdad is reconstructing its nuclear weapons program end of assessment. The Intelligence Bureau of the State Department entered a reservation to this assessment but limited to the claim in the NIE that Iraq had sought yellow cape from Nigeria using entirely different intelligent sources. Britain's MI6 had verified the claim disputed by the State Department. The strength of this assessment is unmistakable. If that assessment had indeed been accurate in the final result and Saddam had been left in place only to provide WMDs to a terrorist group for use against the United States the administration would have failed in its most basic responsibility of protecting the nation. Such a hypothesis underlines the eternal dilemma of intelligence. Intelligence assessments never produce evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Almost always the art of intelligence assessment involves assembling a mosaic from bearing incomplete and sometimes contradictory sources. To insist on such a standard of proof in the future would certainly avoid an Iraq-style intelligence failure but could have other problematic consequences. Let me illustrate in his book entitled The Finish which deals with the killing of Osama bin Laden Mark Bowden quotes the deputy director of the CIA Mike Morel telling President Obama that he'd spent a lot of time on both WMDs and the tracing of bin Laden to Abadabad and quoting him speaking to President Obama and I am telling you that the case for WMDs wasn't just stronger it was much stronger. I had accepted the intelligence as had all of the other senior members of my government who had sat through the numerous meetings of the National Security Committee of Cabinet. The Iraq survey group found no stockpiles. The gist of its conclusions was that although no stockpiles existed, Saddam intended to reconstitute his WMDs once UN sanctions had been lifted and that he had the programs and the wherewithal to do so. Importantly the Iraq survey group judged that Saddam's regime attached great significance to its WMD capability. It had been crucial in maintaining superior already over the Kurds and vital in the war against Iran. As well as the available intelligence logic had suggested strongly that Iraq had WMDs. As the flood report observed and I quote again the fact that Saddam chose to resist inspections to the bitter end suggested strongly that he had WMDs to protect and perhaps that he hoped to avoid defeat by using them. If he did not have WMDs why did he not ultimately comply with the inspection regime in order to ensure the survival of his regime but logic as we now know proved a quite imperfect tool. We know now that planning for and implementation of the stabilisation phase was much more problematic than the initial operation to overthrow Saddam. The decision of the coalition provisional authority under Paul or as he was known Jerry Bremer to disband the Iraqi army was a mistake and the debathification process directed by the CPA went too far. As well as denying coalition forces a homegrown vehicle through which to help maintain order disbanding the Iraqi army put on of the streets tens of thousands of unemployed and disgruntled Iraqis. Many of them became eager recruits for the insurgency which raged until largely subdued by the surge in 2007-08 and as the former president George Bush acknowledged in his book it was a mistake for the Americans to cut their troop levels in the 10 months following the invasion from 192,000 to 109,000. The CPA probably held sway for too long thus reinforcing the sense of an American occupation anathema to all Iraqis irrespective of their attitudes towards the removal of Saddam. The original disposition to cede quickly a large slice of genuine executive authority to a representative although unelected group of Iraqis in advance of elections being held should have been preserved. The post-invasion conflict especially between Sunnis and Shiites which caused widespread bloodshed did more damage in my judgment to the credibility of the coalition operation in Iraq and the failure to find stockpiles of WMDs. Persecution by the pro-Saddam Sunnis of the Shia majority had been a feature of Iraq for the previous 20 years. It was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted but a stronger security presence would have constrained this. The worsening security situation in Iraq particularly the intense sectarian violence starting in 2006 which produced an alarming number of deaths led to the adoption by the Bush administration of the surge strategy under the leadership of General David Petraeus based on improved intelligence and a clear hold and build approach which required committing 30 000 additional American troops at a time when there was a growing pressure at home to pull out it was a gutsy political call and in the result overwhelmingly successful. President Bush was a somewhat lonely believer in the surge many of his generals did not want it and plenty of his senior officials were lukewarm. Many in Washington advocated cutting America's losses and in the case of the current vice president partitioning the country. Coupled with the Sunni awakening in Anbar province and the intelligence led special forces operations against terror attacks it turned the tide against al-Qaeda in Iraq and gave hope that a relatively stable and peaceful nation was in prospect. I met the deeply impressive General Petraeus in Baghdad in 2007 and I hope that a man of such obvious ability returns to senior public life in the United States. Iraq today is not a full democracy as we understand it and frankly only Israel in the Middle East can lay claim to that description. Yet its citizens have on five occasions since 2003 voted either to elect people to govern them or to approve the rules under which they are to be governed despite the violent intimidation they have faced on every occasion. That says something surely for their first for freedom and their willingness to participate in a democratic electoral process. There are still major gaps in Iraqi infrastructure with basic services still falling short yet the Iraqi economy enjoyed 10% growth in 2012 oil exports last year hit a 30 year high at 2.6 million barrels a day and per capita GDP is now markedly higher than it was before Saddam was removed. To what extent has democracy really taken root in Iraq and to what degree if at all have events in Iraq had an impact on the rest of the Middle East. I hope I won't be accused of invoking the Chaoan lie defence when I say that more time should be allowed to pass before attempting to fully answer those questions. When asked what he had what he thought had been the impact of the French revolution on world history the Chinese Communist leader had replied that it was too early to tell. Unlike most of its region Iraq's polity has not been roiled by the Arab Spring that must surely have something to do with the democratic framework which has been established there in recent years. Shortly after the coalition operation in Iraq Gaddafi renounced his weapons of mass destruction and sought readmission to the international community. He and his regime are now of course gone. Also it is hard not to agree with Ndardim Shahadi of Chatham House when she said, no I quote, the idea that the Arab Spring was triggered by a self-immolating street trader in an obscure Tunisian town is just not credible. The ferment in the Middle East now is such that it is difficult to predict what the outcomes will be in five or ten years time and what influence if any events affecting Iraq have exerted. In this context it is worth speculating that if Saddam had not been toppled in 2003 he very likely would still be in power in Iraq. In response to a manifestation of the Arab Spring in Iraq his suppression of any uprising would have been just as brutal as that of Assad in Syria. The reality is that the Middle East remains an incredibly complex place where linkages and causal connection between events are very hard for even the most learned analysts to unravel. To my mind however it is implausible that the events we now know as the Arab Spring be a no relationship of any kind to the overthrow of Saddam's regime in 2003. Although the legal justification for the action taken against Iraq was based on her cumulative non-compliance with UN Security Council resolutions and a properly grounded belief that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction a powerful element in our decision to join the Americans was of course the depth and character of our relationship with the United States. Australia had invoked answers in the days following 9-11. We had readily joined the coalition in Afghanistan. Australia had suffered the brutality of Islamic terrorism in Bali. There was a sense then that a common way of life was under threat. At that time and in those circumstances and given our shared history and values I judged that ultimately it was in our national interest to stand beside the Americans. There were many who argued that we should stay out. We should say no to the Americans for a change. That the true measure of a good friend was a willingness to disagree when the circumstances called for it and that in the case of Iraq we would hurt our country by backing the United States and that in the long run declining to participate in the coalition the willing would be good for the alliance. That argument escaped me then and it still does. In my view the circumstances we recall tonight necessitated a 100% ally not a 70 or 80% one particularly as no compelling national interest beckoned us in the opposite direction. For those who believe the destiny has condemned Australia to a fateful choice between the United States and China. Not a belief incidentally that I share. It is worse noting than in the years that have followed the Iraqi operation Australia's relationship with China burgeoned apparently unhindered by concerns in Beijing that we were too close to the United States. I have long held the view that the Chinese get our alliance with the Americans. They understand its historical political and cultural provenance. If anything our actions in Iraq reinforce the reputation of Australia as a nation that stands by its friends even in difficult circumstances. The recent strengthening of our strategic relationship with Japan for example is in part a result of the close cooperation between the ADF and the Japanese Self-Defense Force in southern Iraq. Let me conclude by saying that I acknowledge that my government's decision on Iraq polarized attitudes in Australia. It was certainly not a pull-driven decision. It is unlikely that the passage of time has softened attitudes towards that decision. It remains my conviction however that it was right because it was in Australia's national interests and the removal of Saddam's regime provided the Iraqi people with opportunities for freedom which would not otherwise have been in prospect. Thank you. Thank you Mr Howard for a very thorough exposition of your argument. Mr Howard has agreed to take some questions. We have about 15 minutes or so. Can I ask audience members to follow these rules? First of all please wait until I call on you. Please wait for the microphone to come to you. Please identify yourself before you ask your question and please confine yourself to questions not comments. Mr Howard I'm going to exercise the Chairman's prerogative if you don't mind and ask the first question. Mr Howard can I ask you about the prudence of the war? Not about the WMD intelligence or the other bases on which the decision was made. Can I ask about the prudence of it? And in retrospect isn't it true that George W Bush's decision which we supported ended up weakening America our great ally. Weakening it in terms of first of all blood if we think of the 5,000 or so American soldiers who lost their lives the 30,000 or so wounded not to mention the Iraqi civilians. If we think of treasure in terms of the trillion dollars or two trillion or however you measure it and in terms of focus in that it diverted America for the best part of a decade from larger challenges such as the fight in Afghanistan and the rise of China. Yes I understand that argument and I respect it. As always of course that is an argument based on retrospective and hindsight. There's always the counterfactual how weakened would America have been if the intelligence had been accurate on a factual basis and weapons had been handed and another attack had heard on the United States homeland. How much weaker would United States have been in I think immensely weaker than her current situation. It was a very costly war and it involved the loss of a lot of American and lives and British lives but particularly American over 4,000 and I've indicated that aspects of the post-invasion phase were not conducted as they should have been but you have to remember that context is everything and the decision that was taken at the time was based upon a reasonable belief that weapons were possessed by Saddam. There was a long track record of tyranny in his own region and a justifiable apprehension that they might be handed to a terrorist group and you've also got to remember the mindset of the American nation. It was not just because I was in Washington on the 11th of September but many in this room will be aware of the preoccupation of the American people with the possibility of a further attack. I mean it was an unbelievably assault on their sense of security and they were dumbfounded by the outrageous nature of the attack and the stunning success of it and that didn't use an incredible sense of insecurity and you have to in making those judgments feed into it. But can I just follow up on that? Sure. Does that mean that in retrospect you can see given the failure on the WMD intelligence that in retrospect the decision weakened America? No, I'm not conceding anything. Of course I'm not conceding anything. Simply what I'm pointing out to you that you're asking me a question circumscribed by the obligation I have to assess the wisdom of the decision we took and the decision the Americans took at the time and you have to juxtapose that against the consequences of that decision not having been taken. And what I'm arguing to you is the country would have been immensely and further weakened if that decision had not been taken. Okay I've had my my shot. The gentleman David Pilling I think it is from the FT if we could get a microphone to the gentleman on the hand. Thanks very much yeah David Pilling from The Financial Times and given your argument that because Iraq was a rogue state because it was thought to have WMDs and that there was a fear of proliferation should not the US today be invading Iran and North Korea and if not why not? Well I don't think the final whistle is blowing on Iran. You know I mean I don't know what will happen in Iran either in relation to the United States or another country in that region through an understanding with the United States or the like I mean I'm going to suggest what the United States should do but if you're saying to me that the the 80 minute whistle is sort of blowing on the whole Iranian issue I think you're wrong. In relation to North Korea I think there is a country called China which is relevant in relation to that. We are constantly told of course that we have to factor China into absolutely everything and that does make a lot of sense and there's in my opinion no country can exert greater influence on North Korea than China and thus far China's refusal to exercise the influence she undoubtedly has says more about China's desire as it were to see North Korea as a bit of a bur in the American saddle than anything else. I don't think it follows in any way automatically from what I said that America should either invade Iran or invade North Korea but they are still works in progress both of them. Thank you Michael and thanks Mr Howard. I found that a very interesting address and may I say that I particularly absolutely agree with your defence of the I think quite wrong claim that you or your government for that matter the other leaders involved misled the public about their views about WMD but I'd like to come at that issue in a slightly different direction that is the question as to whether the WMD and and leaders views on that was a reason or a pretext for the invasion. You mentioned the the realist critique of the of the proposal to invade which came from influential people on the Republican side and which acknowledged the significance of the WMD but argued that invasion was the wrong way to go about responding. As I understand the dynamics in the US debate the response to that within the US came from a group that we'll call the neocons who argued that yes but it's not really about the WMD it's about using Iraq as the starting point to begin a transformation of the Middle East into a region which is more congenial to the United States. Now the question I have for you were two questions if I may the first is did you have a sense at the time in 2002 and 2003 that that was that neoconserved argument was a significant component of the US decision and did you at the time agree with it? I think Hugh the answer to that is that it was a stream of thought of which I was aware. I didn't think it held quite sway over President Bush as it did over others. I think there were some in the administration who held of that view. I think it's fair to say that his Vice President was closer to that view. I think that's well known. I think it's well known that Paul Wolfowitz was an advocate of that view. My recall as honestly as I can give it tonight was that it was not well that was an element. The views that the President formed at the time had more eclectic sources than some people suggest. I think it was a view I felt then as I do now that it's extremely difficult to make long-term predictions about the political cast of the Middle East. I mean nobody thought the Arab Spring was coming. I mean the first confused response of the American State Department to what was happening in Egypt is evidence of that. So I think as part of the drama I suppose and the fervent debate that went on at the time and has gone on since there's been a tendency to overdo the division between the realists and the neocons. There obviously were divisions but I think I can best explain it as I just have. Alison Brunofsky. Thank you very much. I was interested at the beginning of your speech this evening to hear you say that political leaders of the time were responsible for Vietnam not the soldiers and of course that was quite right. Also you told parliament and the media several times before in Iraq the war in Iraq that your government wouldn't breach international law nor seek to overthrow Saddam Hussein and that if no WMDs were found then the invasion could not be justified. You were careful and correct about that yet in defiance of the United Nations Security Council and with no proof of WMD existing in fact the reverse from Hans Plexen his colleagues you and the foreign minister not your whole government decided nonetheless to invade Iraq who is responsible for that decision and for its outcomes if not you. Well can I just take your questions in reverse order Brunofsky? Yeah sure the first point I'd make about who is responsible well I ultimately as the head of the government I have the most responsibility but if you want to know again the precise process the issue was debated and discussed exhaustively in our national security committee which involved the prime minister the deputy prime minister the treasurer the defence minister the foreign minister and for most of the time the attorney general and for virtually all of its deliberations unlike most other cabinet committees they were also present the chief of the defence force the head of the of ONA the head of my department the head of foreign affairs and the secretary of the defence department in addition before the final decision was taken in 2003 despite the endorsement the unanimous endorsement of the national security committee of cabinet I took the issue to a full cabinet and it was endorsed by every single member of that cabinet the second point you asked me about the the legal basis I think with respect to you slightly paraphrased some of the comments I made to parliament but the legal advice that I tabled in parliament in effect said that 678 was react the sanction on Iraq under 678 was reactivated by the failure of Iraq to comply with the requirements of 678 678 being a resolution passed in 1990 after the conclusion of the first Gulf War therefore I do not accept that we breached international law and the legal advice available to the government and tabled in parliament indicated that we did not by the action we took in any way breach international law we have time for one more question the gentleman here has been get my eye for a while if I could ask a question about your critique of the realists Brent Scowcroft etc who opposed the Iraq war the two critiques that you leveled at the realists were first of all that the containment had been ineffective up to that point containment means accepting certain threats unless they're imminent and more could have been done through the United Nations weapons inspectors to establish that there was an imminent threat and so it seems that containment had been effective to a degree the second critique you leveled at the realists was that there was a attitudinal shift and a sense of vulnerability in the United States surely at that point that it's precisely when political leaders are the ones who should exercise cool judgment and make strategic decisions based on that rather than the passions of people who are rightfully feeling vulnerable isn't it the case that these two critiques of the realists are in fact vindications of the objections of the realists to the Iraq war well that assumes of course that there were absolutely no grounds for Americans feeling vulnerable and there were I mean it was an unthinkable proposition that 19 terrorists could organize themselves for the assault that occurred on the 11th of September and the idea I mean implicit in your question is the idea that there were really no grounds for that concern and that the millions of Americans were mad to have those concerns and the government just should have ignored them completely and dampened them down now I just think that misreads with respect the mood of the times I mean it's 10 years ago now and that sense of vulnerability is dissipated but can I assure you it was very intense at that particular time now the first part of your question related to the could you just remind me in the first part of your question I'm sorry that the idea of containment is that you accept that there are certain threats unless there's an imminent possibility of some sort of attack and that's the United Nations weapons inspectors had not shown that there was any imminent threats so although there were certainly threatening elements of the regime at that point it wasn't necessarily evidence that containment wasn't working the difficulty on sorry fair enough the difficulty with that argument is what had happened over the preceding years I mean the whole weapons inspection thing had fallen into disarray and there were multiple you know experts on all sides of the debate including Richard Butler and others who testified to this that the whole sanctions regime was crumbling and it was really only when the mind of the General Assembly and the Security Council were concentrated in September of 2002 when Bush addressed the General Assembly and in effect galvanized the United Nations into doing something again about inspections that the regime was reactivated and in his final report blicks indicated in early in March of 2003 on the eve of the invasion that Iraq was still far from complying and was still a long way short and I think it was a wholly legitimate and logical view to be taken at the time that that process would go on forever and that at some point things had to be crystallized and we now know of course that it seems that Saddam was obsessed about maintaining the fiction of the maintenance of stockpiles but of course that was not something that was known at the time so whilst I I respect the the membership of the realists they contain many fine people but I think the reservations or the criticisms or the flaws that I pointed to in what they had to say legitimate. Mr Howard I might take one more question if you're open to that. Yeah you're going to have your life. The gentleman at the back has been trying to get my attention for most of the evening this will be the last question thank you sir could you wait for the microphone yep thank you John my name is Jason Keisha um just wanted to turn back briefly to to North Korea I know we touched on it earlier um given where we are today 10 years on we do have a rogue state with nuclear weapons the method to deliver it and the threat to use nuclear weapons on South Korea Japan Guam Hawaii and possibly the US mainland. I think we all understand the real politic is different you've got China America doesn't want to invade North Korea. Given the current situation if the US and the West remain or continue to take such a measured approach to North Korea and a patient approach do you think that will encourage other troubled areas of the world to belligerently pursue weapons of mass destruction and think the US is weakened now they're not going to respond they're not going to react as opposed to the way the bush did in Iraq. I think North Korea is atypical uh it's very very hard to say well if you don't do this in relation to North Korea then something else in another part of the world is going to occur. I mean North Korea is atypical at the product obviously of the historic conflict between the two careers it's it's a relic in a political sense of an earlier time but in the the the politics of that dispute are very much tied up in my view with China. I mean it's remains my very strong view that China could bring about a reassurance on that front and it's a legitimate proposition to be put with the Chinese leadership that I mean I'm not I'm not suggesting that that I have any dramatic solution for it was a view I put to the Chinese leaders when I was Prime Minister that they should exert as much influence as they could on North Korea and they nodded and said yes it's very they're very concerned about it but of all the countries in the region the one that has a capacity to really change the direction of the North Koreans is the Chinese. I think what is being done at the present time by the administration and by the Australian government in relation to North Korea is correct. I think it's very very dangerous to try and sort of force comparisons. I was asked earlier about Iran and North Korea you asked me about North Korea. We haven't we haven't heard the final whistle on either and I don't know precisely my views the conventional view at the time and that is that there's a lot of bluster coming out of Pyongyang. It's juvenile but there's always a danger when you have juvenile bluster that you could have an accident and you could have an inadvertent confrontation. America has treaty obligation to South Korea. We have of course a long-standing association with that country and then of course is China which remains in my view the country that could most bring about a change for the better if she were disposed to do so. China may well find that with great responsibility comes with great power I should say comes great responsibility as Spider-Man put it. Ladies and gentlemen can I ask you to thank John Howard for his remarks this evening and for taking all of our questions so patiently thank you Mr Howard. Can I also thank everybody who braved the protesters this evening to attend if you'd like to watch this speech again it will be on the Lowy Institute website tomorrow morning along with an interview that I'm about to conduct with Mr Howard where I'll ask him some more tough questions. Finally can I thank my colleagues who work very hard to stage this event with the usual Lowy Institute professionalism at a different venue. Ladies and gentlemen thank you for coming and we look forward to welcoming you to future Institute events this time back at Blyth Street. Thank you. Good evening. Thank you Mr Howard.