Iraq Duncan Kerr

Radio Interview with Tim Cox

Transcript - ABC Radio, Hobart - 18 March 2003

E & OE - PROOF ONLY

COX: … perhaps this has long been inevitable. I will ask Duncan Kerr the Federal Member for Denison if that is the case or not. Good morning to you.

KERR: Good morning Tim, how are you?

COX: Not too bad thanks. Have we always been anticipating what's taking place today?

KERR: Look I think the Prime Minister crossed that path, that bridge some months ago and we are now seeing a decision simply awaiting a telephone call from the United States President and sadly I think we now face a prospect of a world being re-made. The United Nations Security Council plainly does not support this. It will be an action that is unlawful under international law. The consequences are terribly unknowable. I think everybody is concerned about this. Nobody wishes any harm to come to Australian troops who are involved.

I oppose this war. It doesn't have the sanction of the United Nations Security Council. It is not an act of self-defence and plainly the weapons inspectors were reporting substantial progress was being achieved and war should be reserved as a last resort.

COX: Has the Prime Minister misled the Parliament and the Australian people then, if it is inevitable as you are saying?

KERR: Well look I think technically ‘no'. He has not made a formal commitment of Australian forces to military action and the Cabinet won't do that until they receive the call from President Bush. But I think anybody who is naïve enough to believe that decision wasn't effectively made months ago is living on a different plant.

COX: What steps are still open as far as you are concerned Duncan Kerr, or is it now a case of hoping the number of body bags that come home is a small number?

KERR: I frankly don't know what the outcome of this will be. There is a lot of talk that the war will be quick, clean and surgical and I guess from the perspective of an Australian whose fellow citizens are going to be engaged on one side of it I hope that is the outcome. But history is full of terrible over-expectation of quick, clean results.

I mean you only need to look back to World War II and the siege of Stalingrad to realise that military commanders sometimes proceed expecting that citizens will rebel against their own leaders, that they will fall quickly and are then dismayed at the consequences and I just don't know what the outcome will be and further I don't know what the outcome will be of a post-invasion world where essentially you may find that Osama Bin Laden's ideal of a religious war between the West and the Islamic world has been promoted by the invasion of an Arab nation.

COX: Is there any point in having this Parliamentary debate that I mentioned to Eric Abetz? Is it a waste of time?

KERR: It is never a waste of time to allow the elected representatives of a country to express a view. I believe the debate should have happened before the war. It was permitted in the United Kingdom. There was a vote before that – there will be another. But this is a grave and unprecedented action. It is not just France and the veto of France.

Plainly if the United States could have claimed even a bare majority in the Security Council it would have proceeded down that path. It is an unlawful act. It violates the United Nations Charter. What the consequences will be – how we deal with people who use the same justification as the United States in the future for pre-emptive actions – other states that do that – I think becomes very grey and very murky. The kind of security framework we have relied on, the kind of relationships we have had with neighbouring countries is going to be under immense strain. And of course even within democracies we are seeing in Great Britain the resignation of former Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, who was responsible for developing what he saw was an ethical foreign policy framework for Great Britain.

This is going to be something which unmakes the world and its existing institutions and remakes it. The fashion it remakes it I think is completely unknown and what will emerge may well be, as the United States hopes for …

COX: Doesn't Australia though, Duncan Kerr, as a country blessed with liberty and peace owe it to the people of Iraq to endeavour to end such a barbaric regime there?

KERR: I mean you have to have sympathy with that proposition, but why aren't we invading Zimbabwe, Myanmar or Burma and removing the repressive regimes in those countries. The truth is the fundamental premise upon which the United Nations was established was because of the aggression of the Nazi German regime in invading neighbouring countries on spurious pretext. If you look at the arguments advanced by Hitler before his invasions of those countries, they all claimed lawfulness, they all claimed that they were acting in the interests of global peace and all that nonsense, but the truth was we established the United Nations after World War II and the starting premise is that it is unlawful to resort to war save in two circumstances - only in two circumstances. One is in self-defence. Nobody argues that self-defence is an available justification for Australia or indeed for the United States and secondly, with the authority of the Security Council because it was recognised that there would need to be some international policing jobs done with the use of military force. Now that was the case in the first Gulf War where Iraq invaded Kuwait. The UN supported military action to remove them. Australia participated and I voted for it. Many Australians thought that was wrong, but I thought it was perfectly justified under international law. This is totally different.

This is a situation where we are invading another country outside the charter of the United Nations, outside of international law, because of the desire to go along with the President of the United States and what will the outcome be. We can only hope as Australians together that our world will not be a more dangerous place as a result. But frankly I think those who are asserting that are gambling very gravely with our future.

COX: Duncan Kerr thanks for your time this morning. That was the Federal Member for Denison, Duncan Kerr.

Ends.