Posted on 04/05/2003 4:24:35 AM PST by ONA-ASIS
THE ROAD TO WAR
Australia became part of a planned military strike against Saddam Hussein long before the United States even admitted he was in their sights. National Affairs Editor Tony Wright pieces together our long and secret involvement in the 'War on Terror' and our role as a founding member of George W. Bush's coalition of the willing.
In the new world, which is to say the world dominated by a single superpower, the United States, the big things begin at MacDill Air Base in Tampa, Florida. This is the home of the US military's Central Command. The Americans, always in a hurry, have shortened its name to an ugly contraction: CentCom. The most powerful military men who have ever walked the Earth stride in and out of its entrance beneath the slate-coloured slab of a metal wall that speaks of blunt might and refuses to be softened by a wide lawn and silver birch trees that spread beyond its doors, or by the moist sea breeze that whispers and tumbles in across Tampa Bay from the Gulf of Mexico.
Within, the shape of the 21st-century world is planned on a giant screen linked in real time, through banks of computers and satellite dishes, to similar command centres across the planet. Right now, its facilities – duplicated right down to another giant plasma screen – are linked most importantly to a desert camp in Qatar on the Persian Gulf.
CentCom is one of nine unified combatant commands that control US forces across the length and breadth of the world. Each has a self-appointed Area of Responsibility, and CentCom's is, since the death of the Cold War and the birth of global terrorism, by far the most important to 21st-century America: the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and the northern Red Sea; the Horn of Africa; and South Asia and Central Asia.
It was inside CentCom that Australia began its latest march to Iraq. That march began a long time before the nation – or, indeed, even those most intimately involved – had much of a clue that it might lead to Australian troops flitting about the deserts of Saddam Hussein's country, or its fighter pilots bombing Iraqi emplacements, or its navy sailors removing mines in the far reaches of the Persian Gulf.
It began just two weeks after September 11, 2001, when hijacked jet aircraft smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and into the walls of the Pentagon in Washington, a few blocks from a hotel where Prime Minister John Howard was holding a press conference.
That night, President George W. Bush wrote in his diary: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." There would be an intriguing echo of this allusion 18 months later, a day before Australia finally sent its troops across the borders of Iraq. John Howard, mounting his final arguments for the assault in his address to the National Press Club in Canberra's Parliament House on Wednesday, March 19, 2003, was asked why he did not wait for proof that Saddam was collaborating with Osama bin Laden's terrorists. "I mean," he said, "if you wait for that kind of proof, you know, it's virtually Pearl Harbor."
Howard had long been on song with Bush. The hip Democrat Bill Clinton was not Howard's style at all but the prime minister was a fan of Bush even when he was still Republican governor of Texas.
On September 11, 2001, Howard declared from Washington that Australia would be "resolute in our solidarity with the Americans" in whatever retort might be planned. "Now is the time for calm but lethal responses," he said on radio. "Now is the time for the civilised world to work out the most effective way – not talk about it, not telegraph it – but work out and implement the most effective way of responding." He was as good as his word.
Without talking about it – before or since – a small group of soldiers from Australia's secretive Special Air Service Regiment found their way to CentCom at MacDill Air Base, Tampa, in the days following September 11. There was irony in their journey. The men of this unit had been involved only weeks before in a dubious operation: the boarding of the MV Tampa in an effort to ensure that 438 asylum-seekers – most of them Afghans and Iraqis – did not reach Australian soil. The MV Tampa had been named after the Florida city of Tampa, home of CentCom and an important freight port on the Gulf of Mexico.
The Australian SAS Regiment is familiar with Tampa and its military bases. They are regular visitors at CentCom. Indeed, liaison teams from the three arms of Australia's defence force have been guests at CentCom for years, although until recently they were not part of the inner circle of the US military planning machine.
But this visit was different. The federal government, through Howard and his then defence minister Peter Reith, was straining at the bit to prove to Bush and his administration that Australia was at one with the American superpower. The appearance of the men from the SAS was an unambiguous message: Australia wanted in with anything that was being planned. It was pounding on the door.
The message was not lost. American journalist and author Bob Woodward took up the story in his subsequent book Bush at War, which detailed the 100 days after September 11. He documented a meeting at the end of September 2001 when Bush's closest advisers were planning what would become the "War on Terror" in Afghanistan. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and the top US military man, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard B. Myers, were discussing the finer points of organising a strike on Afghanistan within days.
Rice mentioned the allies "who were clamouring to participate". Woodward wrote that Rice believed getting as many of them as possible invested with military forces in the war was essential; she did not want them all dressed up with no place to go.
"The Aussies, the French, the Canadians, the Germans want to help," she is quoted as saying. "Anything they can do to help. The Aussies have special forces in Tampa. We ought to try to use them." Rumsfeld's initial inclination was to stall. However, he changed his mind – apparently to soothe Rice – saying that "we want to include them if we can". It was the decisive moment in Australia's march to Iraq.
First, though, was Afghanistan.
An Australian battalion of SAS soldiers – and three ageing Boeing 707 air-to-air refuellers deployed to Kyrgyzstan and four F/A-18 Hornet fighters sent to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean – would join the "War on Terror" in Afghanistan and, in the coming months, would surprise and deeply impress the US military. Despite the close link between US special forces and the Australian SAS in training exercises, the two countries had not fought together in an actual war since Vietnam. The Australians were initially sent into areas of Afghanistan considered to have been emptied of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.
But the attitude to the SAS soon changed.
The soldiers brought to the mountains, valleys and plains of Afghanistan a range of skills the US special forces had come to consider all but obsolete. In particular, the ability to melt away into the creepy hills, way behind enemy lines, to hide out for days and weeks without being resupplied, and to transmit reliable and useful information about enemy encampments, patrols and arms stashes was considered remarkable. Teams of no more than five or six Australians began discovering Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters where they were not supposed to be. The SAS caused a deal of mayhem to the Taliban and al-Qaeda guerillas but on occasions also got close enough to local villagers to establish who they were and to ensure they were not attacked by coalition aircraft.
The result was twofold. The US military came to rely upon the Australian SAS as a small but essential and highly skilled part of the coalition effort in Afghanistan.
Back at CentCom in Tampa, an Australian liaison team of officers from the Army, RAAF and Royal Australian Navy, led by Brigadier Ken Gillespie, gained seats at the high table.
Gillespie and a group of eight officers arrived at CentCom just as Howard announced on October 17, 2001, that an Australian military contingent would join the "War on Terror".
Defence Minister Robert Hill told The Bulletin that "the Australian military became engaged at a planning level during the 'War on Terror' that was unprecedented" – an expansive comment that Defence officials confirmed.
"We were given access to American military thinking and planning and we were able to comment, provide ideas and contribute critical judgments at a level that had never occurred previously," Hill said. Australia, the junior partner in the anti-terrorism coalition, had joined the inner circle. The only other nation with such access was Britain. There were 17 countries in the coalition but the US, Britain and Australia were the only nations with "boots on the ground" – a phrase popular with US military chiefs to describe those willing to put their troops to battle.
Hill said that when Australia had previously committed troops to American-led operations, the Australian government had done so "without the best understanding of the full dimensions of what we were entering into".
This was partly because the US was calling the shots but also because Australia didn't have its own people "right inside at the highest levels of the US military".
The new arrangements meant that the Australian government was able to receive regular reports from its military on what its own troops – and the American planners – were doing and thinking.
Gillespie, operating alongside the powerful CentCom chief General Tommy Franks, would report to the Chief of the Defence Force in Canberra, and he would report to Howard. Franks reported directly to Rumsfeld, who reported to Bush. It was a line from Australia's Parliament House into the White House, via the top of the US war machine. It has been this way ever since. With Bush the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in the US, the arrangement invested Howard with a similar cachet in Australia. Hill was known to mutter privately that he sometimes felt like "the minister assisting the Prime Minister of Defence".
Hill is vague about when he began realising that Afghanistan was simply a way station on the road to Iraq, and says he thinks it was around the middle of last year. This, of course, was more than six months before Australians would learn that its government was "pre-deploying" Australian troops in Middle Eastern countries near Iraq in what was claimed to be something well short of a commitment to attack.
In fact, Gillespie returned to Australia a bit earlier than the middle of last year for talks with his superiors in Canberra and the message he brought was unmistakable. Iraq was the next stage.
By then, few senior political figures in Australia could possibly have harboured much doubt that this was the case. Bush had given his famous "Axis of Evil" speech way back on January 29, 2002. Several days later, Newt Gingrich – former Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives and now a member of the US Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, which advises Bush on defence matters – visited Australia. In public speeches, he made clear that the Iraqi leader was a target of Bush's determination to throw long-held principles of deterrence "out the window for terrorists or deranged dictators".
But when he went behind closed doors to a private function at industrialist Richard Pratt's mansion in Melbourne on February 6, Gingrich was far more blunt. Treasurer Peter Costello and Defence Minister Peter Reith were in attendance, and Gingrich had a message for both of them. He said it was no accident that only the US, Britain and Australia had "boots on the ground" in Afghanistan: there was a "fluency of interoperability" between their military machines. "Don't go down the Canadian and New Zealand route – they're working themselves into a state of irrelevance," he said. In short, Australia had to hang tough in the "war on terror" if it was to remain relevant to the US. But there was more to do, he said, and it would cost money. "For the US to do the defence job it needs to do requires 4% of its GDP – Bush is pushing towards it but he's not there yet," he said. (The 2002 US defence budget was $US318bn, or 3.2% of GDP, and it will rise significantly in future years.) Turning to Costello, Gingrich said: "Australia has brilliant military forces but you're right on the edge in so far as the funding you're providing them." (Australia's defence spending at $12.2bn last year, is about 1.7% of GDP.)
In April 2002, Howard travelled to London to attend the Queen Mother's funeral, held on April 9. During the visit, there was a 30-minute private meeting between Howard, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the PMs of Canada and New Zealand, Jean Chrétien and Helen Clark. According to subsequent whispers at the highest levels of the international diplomatic circuit Iraq was the subject. Blair had spent the previous weekend at Bush's ranch at Crawford, Texas, discussing the Middle East and "regime change" in Iraq. Bush told a British television reporter during an unguarded moment that: "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That's about all I'm willing to share with you." On his return to London, the story went, Blair asked his fellow prime ministers if they would join a US-led attack on Iraq. Chrétien and Clark said no. Howard agreed he would consider the matter.
A spokesman for Howard told The Bulletin the Prime Minister had "no recollection" of Blair making such a request at the meeting, and that Blair would not have been in a position to do so. New Zealand's Helen Clark was more forthcoming, though she said she had no recollection of Howard actually committing troops to war at the time.
"I have a very clear recollection of the meeting and Mr Blair raising with us the issue of Iraq because he had just returned from the ranch at Crawford and a meeting which had obviously focused on it," she said last week. "As I have said in other places, at that meeting when it was raised, Mr Chrétien and I expressed some concerns. It is fair to say that Mr Howard has always been perhaps more sympathetic to US arguments about Iraq, but I have no recollection at all of him saying he would commit troops."
The opposition treasury spokesman, Bob McMullan – a former trade minister with wide contacts in the international community – minced no words in parliament when he recalled the occasion during his anti-war speech on March 18 this year. "I believe that the prime minister committed Australia to this war last April and has been committed to war ever since," he said, referring to the London meeting. "I believe that in that meeting Mr Howard sent a message through Mr Blair to US president George Bush that Australia would support military action Iraq."
Bush waited until June to formalise the radical new position he had been hinting at ever since his "Axis of Evil" speech. On June 1, he announced his policy of pre-emption, requiring the US to strike potential enemies before they could attack.
On July 27, 2002, the National Security Committee of John Howard's cabinet met secretly to discuss the knowledge it had about the growing push in the US for a new strike against Saddam. The committee – Howard, deputy PM John Anderson, Costello, Hill, Downer and Attorney-General Daryl Williams – concluded that if the US was preparing to take action against Iraq, then Australia better be in on the ground floor. That day, without informing the wider cabinet, the National Security Committee decided to send Gillespie back to Tampa to win for Australia a direct line into the US military's planning structure for possible action against Iraq.
"We were asked [by the US]: 'Do you want to be in on this planning?'" Hill told The Bulletin. "We made a judgment we should be in on it." Gillespie and a fellow Australian military officer arrived at CentCom, Tampa, on August 10. Over the next weeks and months, as the drive to Baghdad gathered pace, the two-person Australian team would swell to 25. Accompanied by frantic activity within the ADF back home, the team prepared a range of "contingencies", or options, for the government to consider. In other words, side by side with the US and Britain, Australia was considering how many troops, aircraft and ships it could send against Saddam. Hill said the ADF was "always very conscious of not accepting any involvement without political authority" from Canberra. "We had no plan to be in an operation – we didn't know that it would ever happen," he said.
At the time Gillespie went back to Tampa, Bush was insisting he had no war plan on his desk. Hill and the chief of the Defence Force, Lieutenant General Peter Cosgrove, have long insisted that Australia was not at that stage – or in the months beyond – contemplating an actual attack plan. Indeed, John Howard and other members of cabinet were appalled when Downer, in mid-July 2002, declared in Washington that "only a fool would support a policy of appeasement" towards Iraq. The message was too strident. Australia did not want to appear at that stage, at least in public, as if it was ready to march to Baghdad with the US, or that a war was being contemplated.
Nevertheless, The New York Times reported on July 6, 2002, that General Tommy Franks had briefed Bush in June on a "concept of operations" for an attack on Iraq involving tens of thousands of soldiers invading from Kuwait, massive air strikes from as many as eight Middle Eastern countries, and special operations forces strikes at depots for weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to launch them. The plan was contained in a highly classified document entitled CentCom Courses of Action, prepared by planners working in CentCom – precisely where Australia's team had been within the inner circle for more than half a year.
Intriguingly, The Bulletin has learned that 1 SAS Squadron, at its headquarters in Swanbourne, Perth, may have been ordered to prepare for war in Iraq as early as July 2002 – before Gillespie even left for Tampa with his new Iraq-related brief. The claim is contained within an angry email sent early this month by a person purporting to be a serving soldier within the SAS. The long email, sent to Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown and obtained by The Bulletin, was forwarded under a false name but contains previously unpublished information, in relation to operations in Afghanistan, that supports the sender's bona fides as an SAS member.
"John Howard stated that we had only recently started preparing for this looming conflict," the author of the email states. "Bullshit! We, that is, 1 SAS Squadron were given orders to prepare for a war with Iraq around July 2002 …
"Our planning was at such an advanced stage that, whilst the parliamentary debate (on the deployment to the Middle East) was raging, we were already into advanced planning of specific targets … quite contrary to what Howard was saying."
Whether that is correct or not (and informed defence sources have told The Bulletin it is quite possible the SAS decided independently to begin planning before the government or the ADF had taken a decision), there is ample evidence to show that Bush and his closest advisers had for years harboured a desire – and had a plan – to wage war on Saddam.
In January 2000, when he was still governor of Texas, Bush gave a television interview in which he said: "I am very worried about a Saddam Hussein who's not held to account. And if I'm president, and catch him in any way, shape or form building weapons of mass destruction, they'll be taken out." Bush may have actually come late to this position. In 1998, 40 prominent US neo-conservatives signed a letter to then President Bill Clinton proposing steps to remove Saddam, including recognition of a provisional government of Iraqis in exile, air strikes and deployment of ground troops. Among the signatories were a number of people who have assumed positions of immense power under Bush's presidency: Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and an influential Pentagon adviser, Richard Perle.
In his first National Security Council meeting, Bush ordered aides to create two sets of options: a tightening of sanctions on Iraq, and both clandestine and military actions to topple the regime.
After September 11, 2001, Iraq was simply put on the waiting list behind Bush's more urgent requirement to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda terrorists it harboured. From that date, Australia was in the tent, and Howard made sure Australia stayed there.
On January 10, Howard chaired a meeting of the National Security Committee that decided to "pre-deploy" troops to about six countries in the Middle East as part of the US-led build-up to place pressure on Saddam – despite no formal request from the US. The decision was announced publicly three days later, with Howard still saying he hoped it would not come to war. By then, CentCom and Australia's command team had all moved, complete with the sort of command facilities that reside in Tampa, to Qatar.
On March 20, 2003, Howard announced that Australia's forces had commenced combat operations in Iraq.
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