Matilda is walzing home from Iraq, and the Australians are lucky but chastened

Australia Bolts Iraq Over Bush's Lies

Lucky for having lost not one soldier in combat of the 2,000 sent to
join the "coalition of the willing" attack on Iraq in March 2003.
Chastened because Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is now
pulling no punches in decrying the subservience of his predecessor,
John Howard, to Washington.

By Ray McGovern
Announcing the withdrawal of the 550 Australian troops still in Iraq
on Monday, Rudd echoed recent charges by former White House
spokesman Scott McClellan about the Bush administration's "shading"
of intelligence to "justify" an unnecessary war.
Rudd told Parliament he was most concerned by "the manner in which
the decision to go to war was made; the abuse of intelligence
information, a failure to disclose to the Australian people the
qualified nature of that intelligence"; and the government's silence
on "the pre-war warning that an attack on Iraq would increase the
terrorist threat, not decrease it."
Rudd added:
"This government does not believe that our alliance with the United
States mandates automatic compliance with every element of the
United States' foreign policy."

Stung by Rudd's candor, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino fell
back on the canard that "the entire world" agreed on the threat
posed by Saddam Hussein.

As President Lyndon Johnson would have put
it, That dog won't hunt.

If all agreed, why then was President George W. Bush unable to
secure the approval of the U.N. Security Council, without which an
armed attack on another country is illegal under international and
U.S. law?
Among "coalition of the willing" leaders not named Bush, only the
faith-based former British Prime Minister Tony Blair hangs on
pathetically to the notion that "everyone" believed Saddam Hussein
had WMD...

The minutes revealed that at CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002,
Tenet informed his British counterpart that President Bush had
decided to attack Iraq for regime change; that the war would be
justified by the "conjunction" of weapons of mass destruction and
terrorism; and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy."

So we did not really need Scott McClellan's recent revelations to
understand that the intelligence was "fixed," even though our
country's fawning corporate media (FCM) made a Herculean effort to
suppress this key evidence - in part by ignoring and disparaging the
Downing Street Memos when they surfaced three years ago.

Among the saddest aspects of this whole affair, at least for those
who have been in the intelligence profession, is that no one within
the U.S. intelligence establishment saw fit to go public and
disclose the deception that was being used to "justify" a war of
aggression. No one.

The only seasoned officials with the courage to speak out were three
Foreign Service Officers - Brady Kiesling, Ann Wright and John H.
Brown - each of whom resigned before the war since it was clear to
them, even without access to the most sensitive intelligence, that
the war could not be justified.

As for intelligence officials outside the United States, there were
several profiles in courage.
Katharine Gun, a translator in the British equivalent of our
National Security Agency, did successfully leak a very damaging Jan.
31, 2003, memorandum from NSA revealing that the U.S. and U.K. were
pulling out all stops to sell the war, even intercepting messages to
UN delegations in New York and elsewhere.

Andrew Wilkie: Rising to the Challenge

Until he quit nine days before the attack on Iraq, Andrew Wilkie was
a senior analyst in Australia's premier intelligence agency, the
Office of National Assessments (ONA).
Of all the Australian, British and American all-source intelligence
analysts with direct knowledge of how intelligence was abused in the
run-up to the war - Wilkie was the only one to resign in protest and
speak truth to power.
Those who dismiss such efforts as an exercise in futility should
know that on Oct. 7, 2003, the Australian Senate, in a rare move,
censured then-Prime Minister Howard for misleading the public in
justifying sending Australian troops off to war.
The Senate statement of censure noted that Howard had produced no
evidence to justify his claims in March 2003 that Iraq had
stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and castigated him
for suppressing Australian intelligence warnings that war with Iraq
would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks.
One senator accused Howard of "unprecedented deceit."..

Thanks to Wilkie's courage and determination , many Australians were
able to come to an early understanding that the reasons adduced for
war on Iraq were cooked in Washington and served up by Australian
leaders all too willing to give unquestioning support to the Bush
administration...

In the wake of Wilkie's testimony, Australian pundits became more
critical of the Howard government and its persistent refusal to
acknowledge that, as one journalist put it, they were "conned by
master manipulators masquerading as purveyors of objective
intelligence."

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.
He was an
Army infantry/intelligence officer and, for 27 years, a CIA analyst.
He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).

Comment:It should be noted that not all australian military forces have been withdrawn from Iraq -just some on the ground -front line troops)

For the full report :

http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/166279