Australia's Flood Report Doesn't Blame Anybody over Iraq Either

Just a few hours before the US 9/11 Commission failed to place responsibility on anyone for the most damaging attack to the American mainland since the British burned Washington in 1814, Australia's Flood report announced no one down under was responsible for the Bali bombing or going to war in Iraq under false pretenses. The only other country to have a significant force in Iraq is Poland -- one wonders how long before a commission in Warsaw reports that nobody there is responsible either. Meanwhile, the world needs to think about an appropriate honor for Andrew Wilkie, the Australian intelligence analyst who resigned shortly before the war and went public with his concerns to no avail.

Philip Flood is the former Australian Intelligence boss who looked into the Aussie intelligence community's handling of the Bali bombing (which was Australia's 9/11, with 80 or so dead tourists) and the war in Iraq. The report contains the same mealy-mouthed piffle Britain's Butler Report and the American 9/11 Commission Report had. For example, despite "the high-profile failures, the quality of assessment provided to government has been generally very good and, just as importantly, independent of political influence." At the same time, it said, "intelligence in Iraq was thin, it was ambiguous and it was incomplete." The biggest howler was "The inquiry found no indication that either agency's reporting was subject to any political influence. Their reporting on Iraq also demonstrated their capacity to remain independent of allied assessments." In other words, the Australian Office of National Assessment and its Defence Intelligence Organisation got Iraq's WMD issue wrong in exactly the same way the Americans and British did, but they managed to do so independently of Washington and London.

The report saves Prime Minister John Howard's bacon, since it said there was not political influence brought to bear on the ONA or the DIO (just like there was none against the CIA and MI6). It allowed the PM to say, "We did not heavy [Australian for "bully" -- a delightful dialect of English] the intelligence agencies. We never did. We respect their intelligence. I continue, as do my colleagues continue, therefore to reject the proposition that we took this country to war based on a lie."

So how to explain Andrew Wilkie's resignation before the war and his complaints aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation five days before the coalition invaded: "Iraq does not pose a security threat to any other country at this point in time. Its military is very weak, it's a fraction of the size of the military at the time of the invasion of Kuwait. Its weapons of mass destruction program is very disjointed and contained by the regime that's been in place since the last Gulf War. And there is no hard intelligence linking the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda in any substantial or worrisome way."

Interviewed for The Australian for the June 23rd edition, Mr. Wilkie said, ""The report confirms that the WMD reason for war was wrong. There are lots of reasons why we might have considered the use of force against Iraq but WMD was not one." Mr. Wilkie is the Green Party candidate in the seat of Bennelong in the next federal election. Of course, if he were to win, it would be something of an upset -- Bennelong is Mr. Howard's seat. Australian readers are encouraged to help Mr. Wilkie.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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