Wheat for weapons; complacent or complicit?

On my ABC drivetime radio yesterday coming home, I heard a Howard apologist objecting to the allegations of the weakneed Opposition that the AWB bribe money was used by Saddam to buy guns. His primary argument was that money is fungible and the bribe money could have been put to many uses, even to the good of the Iraqi people at large. He indicated it was just unfair to link the AWB bribe money from the Oil-for-Food rort to Saddam's weapons.

Well, I have to admit I made a similar connection: "It is not hard to speculate, as some have suggested, that some of that money may have enabled Saddam to support the Palestinian suicide bombers."

It is therefore fascinating that the Cole commission reminded the Prime Minister, John Howard, that he himself had made just exactly that accusation three years ago:

Counsel assisting the inquiry, John Agius, SC, questioned Mr Howard about a speech he gave in March 2003, shortly before Australia went to war.

In it, the Prime Minister cited Iraq's corruption of the UN oil-for-food program as part of the case against Saddam. The Iraqi dictator, he said, had "cruelly and cynically manipulated the United Nations' oil-for-food program. He's rorted it to buy weapons, to support his designs, at the expense of the wellbeing of his people."

Mr Howard said that information was based on "open sources" and classified government cables. He said it was "public knowledge" that Iraq was rorting the oil-for-food program. But asked whether he ever thought it was possible an Australian company was involved, he replied: "Absolutely not."

Mr Howard was also asked about a series of cables sent to his office in January 2000 following a complaint from Canada to the UN that AWB may have been involved in kickbacks. He said that "to the best of my belief they were not brought to my attention", nor would he have expected them to be.

The brief examination of Mr Howard highlighted the limits of Mr Cole's terms of reference, which do not allow him to explore the competence of the Government, only whether there was evidence it knew AWB was paying kickbacks.

So there you have it. In the Prime Minister's own words, the ill-gotten gains from rorting the UN Oil-for-food program were applied to buy weapons.

But has Howard uttered one word in condemnation of the AWB? Has he rammed thru one terror law that makes it a crime to pay money to a rogue state that uses the money to buy weapons? Has he even hinted at an acknowledgment that his government's policy and practice of pursuing the wheat trade to Iraq at any price and without any oversight and with nothing but the fullest of unqualified backing and support of the Australian government at every turn was the necessary if not adequate factor in the bribery? Isn't that what complicit means?

The sheer audacity of the Sgt Shultz defense put up by the whole Howard gang has got the commentariat in a lather.

Peter Hartcher writes,

So Howard did not need the intelligence agencies to tell him that Saddam was cheating the oil-for-food program, nor did he learn of any of the Australian intelligence that reported the fact that AWB had been complicit.

His conclusions in each case were driven by his own feelings - a "predisposition to believe the worst" in one case and the fact that "I had always believed the best" in the other.

The intelligence system was producing accurate reporting but, evidently, it was all irrelevant to the Prime Minister's beliefs, which went happily undisturbed.

This is much the same approach the Government took to the intelligence system as it prepared to join the invasion of Iraq to curb its weapons of mass destruction program - it ignored reporting that was inconvenient to its political predisposition, and only embraced the information that suited.

In sum, and to borrow an old aphorism, the Howard Government uses the nation's $1.1 billion-a-year intelligence system as a drunk uses a lamppost - not so much for illumination as support.

Any of the thousands of civil servants labouring in Australian intelligence agencies, at home or abroad, and a small number of them at great personal risk, could be forgiven for reading this and weeping.

As counsel for two former AWB executives put it to Alexander Downer on Tuesday: "What is the point of sending your department a piece of intelligence if nobody is going to read it?"

Or, more specifically, if nobody wants to tell the minister or the Prime Minister about it, knowing that it might be politically inconvenient.

In a revealing episode on Wednesday, counsel for AWB suggested that the Government would have received different answers from AWB if it had asked different questions. The implication? That the Government didn't want to know what was really going on because its priority was to keep selling wheat.

From the moment this scandal was exposed, it has been self-evident that the Australian Government, which was legally responsible for enforcing the trade sanctions in place against Saddam Hussein's regime, had been negligent in allowing AWB to pay $290 million in bribes to the Iraqi dictator.

But the political point of the Cole inquiry is that it hasn't found that the Government is guilty of anything worse than negligence. And it wasn't supposed to.

So, after 62 days of hearings, Terence Cole finally came face to face in his courtroom with John Howard in a moment reminiscent of the scene in The Truman Show where Truman, who apparently had complete freedom of movement, discovers that he is really on a movie set designed and controlled by someone else.

It will be Terence Cole's report, but on John Howard's terms.

And Michael Duffy gives us his take:

THE Kids Overboard Waltz has only two moves. First, a minister blames his staff because he knew nothing about the most important thing going on in his portfolio area. Then those staff, far from being punished, are protected and even promoted.

It's an easy dance, but consistency is essential. A dancer who botches the second step will find his partner missing next time he attempts the first.

This Government is no great stylist, but in the political ballroom its consistency is world class.

The Cole inquiry this week reminds us of the role played not only by performance but by illusion in the rise of national security (which includes the "war against terror") as a defining political theme of our time.

I must confess that for years I have struggled to comprehend how it all hung together. As so often, I was struck by the way John Howard saw things differently, and more clearly, than most of us. There was a sort of emotional consistency to national security, but its elements were confusingly varied. The posters on the bus warning me not to go into buildings at unusual times; the wars in which the future of civilisation is at stake yet almost no Australians die; Tampa; ASIO dawn raids in the suburbs; the cruel treatment of David Hicks; the Government's lack of remorse for revelations that we were lining Saddam Hussein's pockets at the same time we were planning to depose him. How had Howard succeeded in bringing all this together and making it work so well for him?

After watching Tony Blair in Parliament a few weeks ago I think I have the answer. What these men have been doing is like putting on a show. Howard doesn't present as a showman - much easier to imagine Blair in top hat and tails - but this is what they've done, and done so well.

A show is big business and needs investors. Recently in The Australian Financial Review, Laura Tingle estimated that Australia now spends "more than $2 billion a year on intelligence gathering, national security and counter-terrorism". And that excludes the Defence Force. The media become committed to the show for subject matter. So do many intellectuals: a diploma in international relations is the new arts degree. The show's investors commit not just money but ideas and careers.

A show needs a book. Looking at the war on terrorism in terms of a fictional creation (albeit one with strong roots in reality) helps explain its protean nature and why it could go on even after its original story-lines (the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the possibility of parachuting successful democracy into Iraq) foundered. It explains why the plot can be altered so readily for improved dramatic effect (for example, the about-turn of the Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, after the Madrid bombings).

If we were really fighting a war for the future of our civilisation, these examples could pose serious moral problems. But in a show, such concerns don't matter. The aim is not truth but art: to improve the performances, to make each photo opportunity better than the last. As in a big show, the producers deploy advertising, co-opt the media and corrupt the critics.

Like all great art, the show eventually becomes judged by the taste it itself has formed. At first it draws on reality (all those references to Australia's Anzac tradition) but eventually it affects men's hearts and changes reality (all those Muslim fighters pouring into Iraq).

What then is the purpose of this long-running production? It panders to the producers' egos: it's more stirring to fight for civilisation than reform the tax-welfare mix; more fun to stand next to the big guy at the White House than dine on scraps with Helen Clark in Wellington.

But the main purpose is simply to keep the showmen in a job. These days most people engage with politics through the media. Therefore any government must dominate that small portion of the media devoted to politics, with issues where it has an advantage over the Opposition. Modern media management at its most successful is proactive and nonstop, the strategic aim being to leave no gaps that might be filled by other people, pushing issues where the government is weak.

This was probably the main reason the US, Great Britain, and Australia invaded Iraq - because their leaders knew the public and the media expected them to do something big after September 11. The worst thing a modern government can be seen to be doing is not to act, not to respond. Better to be criticised for the way you act than for not acting at all.

This helps explain the otherwise puzzling fact, brought home by Blair's visit, that there is a lot of disagreement between the British and Australian labour parties - and the conservatives, too - on the Iraq war. This is because the war is about not ideology but the opportunities of incumbency. The showmen would vehemently deny this, which is only natural: to be a successful showman, you must believe in what you're doing.

John Howard does not look like a showman. But his great success in using foreign policy to confuse his rivals and attract an audience suggests he learned a lot from watching Sir Robert Menzies (a man quite at home in top hat and tails) use communism to the same ends, which included taking Australia into Vietnam. That was a great show too, although less of a creative triumph than this one because the threat of communism was so big and lots of Australians died.

The greatest shows are those that contain the most art.

The political analysis of this wheat for weapons affair is neither complicated nor flattering to Howard. But he didn't get elected on other peoples' analyses, and by his reckoning, he's got the Australian electorate right in the hip pocket, where he wants them. He's not Alfred E. Newman, but he's got no worries, either, as Richard Ackland explains:

EACH passing day sees Kevin Rudd from the Opposition more and more upset about the inevitable outcome of the Cole inquiry. John Howard and Alexander Downer are "smiling and giggling", he complains, because they know that they are off limits as far as any adverse findings by the commission are concerned.

The sight of Downer, in particular, smiling and giggling is distressing and I know how Rudd must feel, but one wonders why it took him so long to work this out.

The terms of reference have been posted on the Cole inquiry website since it started. Nowhere does it mention that Terence Cole has the authority to report on the negligence, inadequacy or mendacity of Howard or his ministers.

Rudd does have a point - we sort of know what Cole is going to say. Various people from AWB and maybe even the Tigris connection are likely to be recommended for prosecution under some law or other. The report will go off to the Director of Public Prosecutions who thereafter will call the shots. So far it is sort of running to script, although there has been a bit more Government blood splashed on the page than expected. It is still not yet at the level of excitement of, say, the Italian elections, with screams of "testicles" and "mortadella" filling the air, but it's on the way.

Howard and his ministers have repeated ad nauseam how magnificent they are for setting up this wonderful "transparent" process, whereas in fact they have only gone halfway with what the UN required.

The Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, said on October 27, when Paul Volcker's "manipulation" report, as it is known, was released, that he wanted member governments to take steps to "prevent the recurrence of such practices in the future and that they will take action, where appropriate, against companies falling within their jurisdiction".

Well, the second leg is under way, but the first part is nowhere on our horizon. To have a commission of inquiry investigate and report on how to "prevent the recurrence" of illegal and immoral sanctions busting against an enemy of the state would inevitably require the removal of the ministers who consciously or negligently oversighted the "practices".

In a sense, it doesn't matter that Howard or Vaile or Downer can't recall anything or didn't read their cables. The documents that Cole has revealed and the evidence from both the departments and the companies allows us to draw certain unkind inferences about their denials. Cole could draw them, too, if his job allowed him to go that far.

There is a time-honoured pattern with politically charged "independent" investigations. The government of the day first of all clears the decks, it defines very tight terms of reference, appoints the correct man for the task (when can you remember it being left to a woman?) sets an impossible deadline for the reporting date and provides a measly budget for the whole exercise.

Inquiries of this sort only work if the political leadership supports the investigation. In Queensland, the deputy premier, Bill Gunn, gave the Tony Fitzgerald police inquiry all the support it wanted.

To want to really get to the bottom of a scandal a government has to be sincere, brave, noble or stupid. Qualities you would never accuse the Government in Canberra of possessing.