John Howard hits out at Kevin Rudd over Iraq War claims

John Howard has defended his decision to commit Australia to the 2003 invasion of Iraq after Kevin Rudd accused him of lying.

Former prime minister John Howard. Picture: AAP.

John Howard has defended his decision to commit Australia to the 2003 invasion of Iraq after Kevin Rudd accused him of lying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, rejecting claims he misled the public.

The former Liberal prime minister said the “available evidence” from Australian intelligence agencies prior to the invasion was that Iraq was in possession of WMDs and noted this had been previously ­acknowledged by Mr Rudd.

Fifteen years after the US-led coalition forces began their ­assault on Baghdad, Mr Howard suggested the intelligence his government received was just as good or better than that received by US president Barack Obama when he opted to “take out” Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

He said Mr Obama “correctly made the call” to proceed, but the “world would have descended upon his head” if the intelligence was flawed.

Mr Rudd, who succeeded Mr Howard as prime minister in 2007, said the 2003 Iraq invasion represented one of the nation’s “two great foreign policy failures” since 1945, along with Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In an opinion piece yesterday in Fairfax ­papers, Mr Rudd said both decisions represented an “abysmal failure” of political leadership but argued Mr Howard had “lied to the Australian public”.

But Mr Howard said the intelligence his government received had “concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” and attacked Mr Rudd for not putting himself in the “shoes of the government of the time”.