Pip Hinman
As Japan's troops prepare to leave Iraq, PM John Howard has announced that Australian troops will stay, despite the majority of Iraqis not wanting them there. However, the Australian Defence Force's (ADF) shooting of the trade minister's bodyguard on June 21, which has prompted Iraqi government threats to scuttle a wheat deal with Australia, has increased the pressure on Canberra to withdraw the troops.
The bungled killing of the Iraqi security guard and the mysterious death of Private Jake Kovco have reminded the Australian public of the illegal and disastrous military adventure in Iraq. The Greens and the ALP have repeated their calls for the troops to be brought home.
Japan is the latest country to pull out of the occupation, with Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi announcing on June 20 that the 550 ground troops sent to Iraq in 2004 would leave. The unpopular participation was Japan's largest military deployment, and the first to a war zone, since World War II. Their final deployment in Iraq was in the southern Al Muthanna province, alongside ADF troops. Japan's air force is expected to continue to provide the US army with logistical support from a base in Kuwait.
Australia's defence minister, Brendon Nelson, said on June 21 that the government will reassess where the 460 ground troops go at the end of the year — after the mid-term US Congressional elections in November. (Australia has 1350 ADF personnel in and around Iraq.)
In the short term, the Australian ground troops will be sent to Tallil Air Base, 300 kilometres south-east of Baghdad and close to the city of Nasiriyah. They will partially replace 800 Italian troops. Nineteen Italian troops died in a truck-bomb explosion in Nasiriyah in 2003, and Howard and Nelson admit that the Australian troops are moving to a "high risk" area.
Dr Alan Dupont from the conservative Lowy Institute told the ABC's PM program on June 20 that the Australian troops' new role will be as a "rapid reaction ... backup force for the Iraqis and that could cover a multitude of contingencies, some of which may be significantly risky". He added that how long the Australian troops will remain in Iraq is "really going to be determined by when the Americans pull out".
Canberra has repeated the mantra from Washington that foreign troops will stay in Iraq until they are no longer "needed". The sight of an uncomfortable looking Iraqi PM, Nouri al Maliki, sitting silently next to a gas-bagging President Bush at a hastily organised media conference on June 13 during the latter's five-hour stop-over said it all. It is the US, and not Iraqis, that will determine the departure timetable. (The Republicans are even staking their mid-term Congressional reelection bid on a "no timetable for leaving Iraq" policy.)
Even Mowaffak el Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor, says the foreign troops are becoming a liability. Writing in the June 20 Washington Post he said that just four of Iraq's 18 provinces are ready to transfer security from foreign to Iraqi troops (two in the north, Irbil and Sulaymaniyah, and two in the south, Maysan and al Muthanna) and nine are almost ready to do so. The departure of foreign troops will help Iraq, he wrote, because Iraqis "now see foreign troops as occupiers rather than the liberators they were meant to be".
A British Ministry of Defence poll published last October showed that 82% of Iraqis are "strongly opposed" to the foreign troops and fewer than 1% cent think foreign troops are helping to improve security.
But for the moment Canberra is adamant that the troops must stay. Australia is one of a dwindling number of countries prepared to back the US war in Iraq: less than 30 of the original 41 "coalition of the willing" countries remain, with Italy beginning its phased withdrawal from June and Britain scaling down its 8000-strong force. Besides Poland (900), Romania (830) and Denmark (550), most foreign troop contingents in Iraq are only a few hundred strong and are there to give political cover to the US, which still has 133,000 troops in Iraq.
[Pip Hinman is an activist in the Sydney Stop the War Coalition.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 28, 2006.
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