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Ex SAS officer describes Iraq as a strategic and moral blunder
Major Peter Tinley (Ret'd), the SAS officer responsible for the Iraq war plan for Australia's special forces, has spoken out against the strategic and moral blunder that constituted the invasion of Iraq. He makes it clear that there was never anything approximating compelling evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, saying that the US forces would "[confess], off the record, that there had not been any tangible sighting of any WMD or WMD enabling equipment for some years."
More importantly, he has this to say about the Government's conduct in ordering our troops into that invasion:
The notion that pre-emption is a legitimate strategy in the face of such unconvincing intelligence is a betrayal of the Australian way.
He also stated that "the Government had broken a moral contract with its defence force in sending it to an immoral war".
The latter point is perhaps the most important one there, and reflects another factor that always made me uncomfortable with the Government's decision to invade Iraq. While supporters of the war liked to claim that opponents of it were failing to support the troops, the truth is exactly the opposite.
Our defence forces stand ready to put their lives on the line to defend the nation. For good reasons they are trained to obey orders without question - a defence force whose members regularly questioned the validity of orders would be unworkable.
Because unquestioning obedience of orders is necessary to the operation of the defence forces, those who give the orders have an obligation to adhere to the highest possible standards of conduct when determining what orders to give. While Major Taylor describes the decision to go to war in Iraq as a breach of a moral contract with the defence forces, he does not go far enough. Sending troops off on an aggressive, illegal war amounts to a gross betrayal of our troops. Such a decision uses defence force personnel, who sign up to serve the noble purpose of putting their lives on the line to defend their nation, by making them risk death in order to achieve a goal that is entirely lacking in nobility.
John Howard's decision to invade Iraq did not merely fall short of the duty he owed to our troops - it amounted to a complete and disgraceful abrogation of the duty. It trivialised their commitment to the nation by using them for a purpose entirely incompatible with the duty they signed on for.