Why the War Was Wrong.

• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Position: Book Review

WHY THE WAR WAS WRONG

Editor: Raimond Gaita Published by: Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2003, 200pp, $27.95.

This is a collection of seven essays by liberal-left Australian writers who have been angered and energised by their country's enlistment among the 'coalition of the willing' in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The core of the book is provided by a series of public lectures given in Melbourne (and sponsored by the School of Philosophy of the Australian Catholic University in Fitzroy) in July and August 2003.

All essayists share moral outrage at the alacrity with which the Howard government went--like Harold Holt's 'All the way with LBJ'--into trouble with GW to be a good ally of the United States. They decry Prime Minister Howard's acceptance and parroting of the weak arguments about weapons of mass destruction in justifying the anti-Saddam incursion. Surprisingly, given the progressive politics of all the authors involved, nothing at all is said about globalisation or the Howard administration's pursuit of a free-trade deal with Washington. Nor is anything substantive said about what in their minds differentiates the Iraq campaign from Australian participation in the assault on beleaguered Afghanistan in 2002. Amazingly, the Bali outrage gets about three cursory references.

In the 'Introduction' Gaita (an Australian academic based at the University of London and the Australian Catholic University) makes much of the British public's rebellion against Tony Blair and asserts that 'Their resistance puts Australia to shame.' A philosopher, he focuses on 'the moral reality that the dead are the most important cost of the war and that most of them are dead because we and our allies killed them'. By far the punchiest contribution is Mark McKenna's robust and cynical assessment of Howard's misuse of Australians' historic reverence for the Anzac 'Digger'. This misuse, McKenna asserts, is designed to justify Howard's re-working of the 'just war' arguments to focus the revised script of selfless Aussie battlers doing battle, Timor-style, in the Middle Eastern theatre (again), in the interests (this time) of liberating the oppressed Iraqi people. McKenna's outrage is justified by a discreet scholarly apparatus that is regrettably absent from most of the other pieces in this book.

The collection opens strongly with Robert Manne's coherent recitative of neo-conservative 'action theology' as developed by Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld ('Explaining...