Even with hindsight the Iraq war was the best option for all concerned

Let me be blunt; I think we were right to play our own small part in the destruction of the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a far from perfect operation, mistakes were made and the sectarian violence which followed was appalling. But there are three reasons why the world is better off for the demise of the Hussein regime.

Brutal regime: Saddam Hussein. Photo: AFP

The first is simple humanity. Hussein’s regime was one of extreme brutality. He murdered thousands of his people – Shiites and Kurds – to consolidate his dictatorial hold on power. He used chemical weapons against his own people.

For many, foreign policy realism meant accepting appalling human rights abuses, particularly in the Arab world. Realists argue the international community has no right to decide how individual countries are governed; I don’t accept that. Sovereignty is important but not more important than humanity. It has always made sense to me that if freedoms are oppressed with egregious cruelty, then the world should not stand by and ignore it.

I supported the NATO campaign in 1997 against the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic; I set up the human rights dialogue with China; I was an early champion of the International Criminal Court; and I championed the overthrow of the brutal regime of Hussein.

Plenty of critics argued 10 years ago that to contain Saddam was enough. Well, it wasn’t if you were an Iraqi Shiite or a Kurd. Which, by the way, is most Iraqis.

The destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime began a slow, rickety, imperfect process of spreading democracy and freedom through the Arab world. Lebanon held democratic elections, Jordan liberalised, albeit under a monarchy, the Palestinians began the march towards democracy and, more recently, we’ve seen the so-called Arab Spring.

These democratic reforms, including in Iraq, have been imperfect to say the least. There is still a long way to go. But the fashion for kleptocratic dictatorship in the Arab world, led by Nasser in Egypt in the 1950s, has gradually passed.

Second, there is the issue of chemical and biological weapons. These days it’s fashionable to proclaim Hussein didn’t have any. The whole issue of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction arose not because poor old Saddam was some benign and misunderstood gentleman, but because he did have these weapons and he used them. He used them against the Iranians in the Iran/Iraq war which he started.

After the Iraq war, the unit charged with the task of finding Hussein’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons – known as the Iraq Survey Group – found none. The assumption is that the regime had destroyed its stockpiles sometime between 1992 and 2003. That remains an unanswered question. The UN inspectors were never happy this had happened. Nor were Western and Israeli intelligence agencies.

But what the Iraq Survey Group did find was that Hussein planned to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction programs once the UN inspection team had been sent packing. Had that happened, the Middle East would have been a much more dangerous place than it already is.

Which brings me to the third point; geopolitics. More than two decades ago an international coalition went to war with Hussein’s regime to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Hussein’s ambition was clear. He wanted to become the dominant political figure of the Arab world and he was prepared to go to war with his neighbours to gain that status.

It is one thing to complain we evicted him by force from office, but what would have been the consequence of leaving this deeply anti-Western dictator in power? Iraq would have increasingly become a threat to Israel, to its neighbours and to Western interests.

None of this is to say the Americans did a great job after the Iraqi regime was defeated. They shouldn’t have taken over political control of the country, destroyed the Iraqi army or pursued the de-Baathification program with such vigour. We – and the British – made those arguments at the time. So did a lot of Iraqis.

And it is true, the sectarian conflict which followed was brutal and it still goes on.

But if the threshold question is, should we have played a part in getting rid of Saddam Hussein a decade ago, my answer is an unequivocal yes. We played a small part in evicting the world’s most brutal dictator who made President Assad of Syria look moderate. We played a tiny part in starting to change theologies of the Middle East from dictatorship to democracy. And we helped spare the region and the world from a dictator who aspired to dominate the Arab world and threaten Israel.

That was the thing about the Howard government: we stood for something. And one of the things we stood for was freedom.

Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007.

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