On 20 March 2003 the United States (US) with military support from its allies the United Kingdom (UK), Australia and Poland went to war with Iraq, launching Operation Iraqi Freedom. The invasion force comprised approximately 148,000 US military personnel along with some 45,000 British, 2000 Australian and 200 Polish (Australian Department of Defence 2003). Major combat operations ended just weeks later, on 1 May, heralding the beginning of the US-led occupation of Iraq, which formally ended in December 2011.
The decision to invade Iraq was highly controversial at the time and had calamitous consequences. The Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) it was claimed Iraq had and which provided formal justification for the invasion, turned out not to exist. Consequently, post-war, the arguments advanced by the United States, British and Australian governments for going to war in Iraq were discredited. While each of the three politicians who had led their countries to war in Iraq was subsequently re-elected, President George W. Bush and the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair were clearly politically damaged by the war decision and its aftermath. A CNN poll found that Bushâs approval rating hit a new low of 31% on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, down 40 points on his 71% approval rating at the outset of the war, an almost identical drop to that suffered by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam war (Steinhauser 2008). In the UK, Blairâs personal approval rating plummeted in the weeks preceding the invasion. A February 2003 Guardian/ICM poll found that his personal popularity, as distinct from that of his party, had dropped to minus 20 (Travis and Black 2003). A YouGov/Daily Telegraph poll found that by early 2007, only 22% of Britons felt that Blair could be trusted: down from 63% when he was first elected in 1997 (Weiner 2007). The Iraq war decision hastened the end of his political career; he was pressured into standing down as Prime Minister to make way for Gordon Brown in June 2007, well in advance of his intended date of departure.
In contrast, while public sentiment in Australia had always been opposed to the war (or, at best, balanced during the early weeks of the invasion (Goot 2003, 2007)), Prime Minister John Howard and his government were spared the backlash in public sentiment experienced by the other coalition partners. In the 2004 election, Australians returned the Howard government giving it the first majority in both houses of parliament since 1977, and by the 2007 election Australians ranked the war in Iraq overall as only 9th in issues of importance; 6th for Greens voters, 8th for Labor voters and 13th for Liberal-National party voters (Bean and McAllister 2009). Clearly, Australians did not feel as aggrieved by the war, or their leadership, as the British or Americans did. The question as to why this was the case is one that this book sets out to answer. In doing so we focus on Howardâs ability to manage the publicâs perceptions of him and his deft handling of his relationships with political colleagues, as well as the institutions of government, all of which contrasted with Blairâs more difficult task. In part, this reflected the more significant UK troop commitment, the greater extent to which Blair was identified as an advocate of the war, and so the greater responsibility critics felt he bore for the consequences of the invasion, particularly as the WMD Blair had claimed were central to the Iraqi threat could not be found.
The costs of the war in terms of Coalition blood and treasure were considerable. Over the course of the war, close to 4500 US servicemen and women died before troops were withdrawn in December 2011, with a further 300 other coalition deaths, including 179 from UK, 33 from Italy and 23 from Poland (iCasualties.org 2012). No Australians died during military action in Iraq, although there was one accidental death and another involving an Australian serving with the Royal Air Force. More than 33,000 US troops (iCasualties.org 2012; Iraq Body Count 2012) and around 6000 British troops (Casualty Monitor 2016) were wounded. This does not include the tens of thousands of UK troops who were âwounded mentally as well as physicallyâ (Chilcot 2016a, p. 4) and an estimated âone hundred thousand US soldiers [who] have returned from the war suffering serious mental health disorders, a significant fraction of which will be chronic afflictionsâ (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008, p. ix).
The estimated financial cost of the Iraq war for the United States has ranged from US$806 billion (Belasco 2011)âwhich included Department of Defense, State Department/USAID and Department of Veterans Administration budget submissions and medical care for Iraq war veteransâto an estimated three trillion dollars, if the ongoing cost of supporting veterans, including social and economic costs, are included (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008). The Iraq conflict cost UK taxpayers around ÂŁ9.2 billion (Chilcot 2016b). It has been estimated that the financial costs of the Iraq war have been âmore than double the cost of the Korean warâŠ[and] are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War and twice that of World War 1â (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008, p. 6). According to Stiglitz and Bilmes, only the Second World War cost more in real terms.
Nevertheless, the cost to the Iraqis has been arguably greater still. Estimates of Iraqi deaths between 2003 and 2011 range considerably, from 158,000 (of which around 79% were civilians [Iraq Body Count 2012]) to more than one million (Reuters 2008). Iraq Body Count estimates that only around 13% of all documented civilian deaths were directly caused by US-led coalition forces and over half of these occurred during the invasion in 2003 and the sieges of Fallujah in 2004 (2012). The rest were caused by Iraqis and insurgents. Following the post-invasion fracturing of the Iraqi state the UNHCR estimated in September 2007 that there were then around 4 million displaced Iraqis, 2.2 million within Iraq and a similar number abroad, with around 1 million displaced prior to the war (UNHCR 2007). The fracturing of the Iraqi state also brought wider regional costs, leading to the rise of ISIS, the need to engage in war against ISIS, and the ISIS-inspired terrorism that was experienced across Europe and extended to the United States and Australia. Hence, while the war succeeded in its narrow aim of removing the regime of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, it failed in its broader aim of bringing security and stability to the region and making the states that contributed to the invasion effort safer.
The Iraq war continues to generate questions about governance on the road to the Iraq war decision and the adequacy of key democratic institutions in the UK and Australia; around democratic policy making, the role of parliament in making war decisions, political accountability and transparency, the role of the media, the use of intelligence and the adequacy of public debate. For a number of reasons this is a propitious time to revisit the political processes that led to the war decision in the UK and Australia and to examine the effectiveness of democratic institutions in checking and balancing executive power and holding elected officials to account for the decisions they made. The immediate heat of war has passed, and much has been learnt from official inquiries (both their reports and, perhaps even more importantly, the evidence they have brought into the public domain), politiciansâ memoirs, and journalistic investigations. Moreover, the most extensive of these investigations, the Chilcot inquiry, begun in 2009 finally delivered its report, containing over 2.5 million words, in the summer of 2016. The issues are still fresh and in many respects debate has been reinvigorated by the depth of new material contained in the Chilcot report and by its analysis. At the same time, the consequences of the war continue to be felt through the Middle East and beyond, highlighting the continuing importance of the questions we consider in this book.
Structure of the Book
This book is a comparative analysis of governance and democratic institutions in two mature parliamentary democracies, the UK and Australia, in the context of both countriesâ decisions to go to war in Iraq in 2003. The premise underpinning it is that comparative analysis of the Iraq war decision and its aftermath can help better illuminate the nature of the processes that led to it and that, as set out by B. Guy Peters in his guide to comparative theory and methods, the cases of Australia and the UK are âcapable of saying a good deal about the process, as well as a great deal about the countriesâ (Peters 1998, p. 13). It is rooted in the fact that in a parliamentary democracy arriving at the Iraq war decision and committing troops to combat was the outcome of a process, but that much can be learned from analysing just how that process unfolded in the different national settings of Australia and the UK. In this, we highlight both commonalities and key differences in policy formulation and the precise nature of the routes that led both countries to contribute militarily to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In this way, the book represents a comparative analysis of one case of public policy formulation and implementation.
It is organised thematically, rather than strictly chronologically, in order to facilitate this approach and focuses on several key variables:
- The nature and significance of the structural constraints arising from understandings of the âspecialâ relationships each country understood it enjoyed with the United States, including understandings of the requirements this was understood to impose on them.
- The role and nature of prime ministerial leadership and of political institutionsâof approaches to cabinet government, the role of Parliament and the respective bureaucracies.
- The significance of party politics and the imperatives of party management.
- The role of the media as a constraining or questioning factor and the nature and success of political strategies designed to manage the media.
In additi...