Wooley: Let’s hope, despite appearances to the contrary, that Don does know what he’s doing
President Trump’s attack on Iran carries an eerie echo of the US-led attack on Iraq 20 years ago, writes Charles Wooley.
Opinion
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Iran today takes us back down the time tunnel to Iraq two decades ago. It would be nice if the world grew incrementally better year after year and that the steady progress of humanity was always out of darkness into light. But history too often tells us otherwise.
I remember interviewing John Howard for 60 Minutes in the Sydney studios of Channel 9 just after he had committed Australian troops to the invasion of Iraq.
The PM’s declaration of war on March 18, 2003, was made much in the same spirit as Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities this week; the assumption that the then-bad guy, dictator Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction. He had blustered enough about using them: “It will be the mother of all wars. We shall rain fire and scorpions on their children’s heads.”
How could we have known it was all grandiloquence. He didn’t have nukes. He had fire and scorpions.
But when I interviewed Howard, I believed, like most Australians, that Saddam being a nuclear menace was a reasonable assumption. I didn’t know then the longstanding, slightly inelegant military expression that, “Assumption is the mother of all
f---ups.”
How right was that maxim? The Coalition of the Willing assumed wrong and the Iraq invasion was exactly as old soldiers would have warned.
Saddam had ruled with an iron fist and effectively suppressed religious inspired terrorism in his region.
Yes, he was a monster but without him things got even worse. The balance of power was overturned. Iraq’s traditional enemy Iran was able to subvert and inflame much of the Middle East.
Al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, Isis; a whole Pandora’s box of horror had been opened. 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and all the global combustion of the past 20 years can be traced back to the fatal assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
“WMDs” they were called and when reduced to a simple three-letter acronym the proposition somehow became all too believable.
In make-up before the 2003 television interview, I asked Howard in conversation, and for my own information, because I suddenly realised I didn’t know the answer, “prime minister, what is the population of Iraq?”
To my surprise the PM didn’t know either. It was very early in the age of Google, so he asked an adviser to make a phone call and find out.
It turned out to be 25 million and considerably more than Australia back then.
The PM seemed mildly surprised. Still, he was lucky that I had naively asked before the cameras were rolling.
Imagine:
“Prime minister, thank you for joining us tonight. Can I ask you a simple question, first up. What is the population of Iraq?”
“Er uh, I’ll have to take that question on notice?”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t have the figure to hand, no.”
“You mean we are invading a country, and we don’t know how many of them there are?”
Now, just in case President Trump finally recognises Albo and charms him into getting more involved in another Middle Eastern war than he presently wishes, our PM should know the population of Iran is 45 million.
And since we have now deployed 100 soldiers to help Ukraine in its bloody war against Russian aggression, he might also note that the population of Russia is about 150 million. Still, we have warned the tsar, and I am sure Putin will be worried.
Despite all my years in journalism and in a few nasty places, clearly learning nothing from history this week I found myself agreeing with our Prime Minister’s endorsement of the American attack on Iran’s nuclear processing facilities.
I can imagine better presidents than Trump (not too hard to picture?) would have taken the same peremptory action this week.
I can hear Kennedy’s famous speech during the Cuban missile crisis “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right. Not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere and we hope around the world.”
By contrast, a banal President Trump this week announced, “a spectacular military success”.
He told the world, “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.”
With his call for regime change, “Make Iran great again”, Trump obviously writes his own stuff. He is no Kennedy, but he might sound more presidential if he hired a good speechwriter.
Kennedy employed the Pulitzer Prize winning author Theodore Sorenson, who in 1962 wrote
Kennedy’s famous “We choose to go to the moon” speech:
“We choose to go to the moon and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Kennedy declared.
Today, Ted Sorenson would have played with a similar twist:
“That while the decision to remove Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity was an onerous and dangerous one, to do nothing would have been even more dangerous.”
The realpolitik is that Iran is committed to the total destruction of Israel.
Israel has no weapon like the bunker blasters Trump dropped this week, but reportedly it could have at least nine nuclear warheads which in an existential crisis it might have felt forced to use.
This week President Trump preferred to apply his own command of the English language.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the
f--- they are doing,” he said.
Let’s hope, despite all appearances to the contrary, that the Don does know what he’s doing.
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist
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