The absence of important cabinet papers on Australia’s decision to join the war against Iraq should surprise no one. The justification itself, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and was in the process of gaining nuclear weapons, was dramatically shown to be false. The spin that leaders such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair operated in good faith belies the truth of either falsity, or credulity unworthy of a national leader.

Iraq was likely the most surveilled country in the world. There was no place weapons inspectors could not go, including Saddam’s palaces. The illusion of WMDs was not a failure of intelligence agencies, of which the US has among the world’s most capable. The justification, like the decision to go to war, was a political one, leaving the real motivation as a topic of much speculation.

Illustration: Simon Letch Credit:

Australia’s calculation, on the other hand, had less to do with Iraq and more to do with Australia’s determination to bind itself to the US for moral leverage should it ever need America to come to its defence. Simple, and effective. While passing US presidents such as Donald Trump may be disrespectful to an Australian prime minister, as he was with Malcolm Turnbull, the US establishment, from the Congress to the military, honours that bond.

But Australia and the West boast of moral and legal decision-making. The decision to invade Iraq failed those high standards. Australia’s Labor Party was then in opposition and opposed to the war. Now in government, it has rightly initiated a review of why crucial documents were not provided to the National Archives. It is reassuring that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has vowed to make public those missing documents, which were only found just before Christmas, unless their release would put people in danger.

Dennis Richardson, the former ASIO director-general who is leading the review, is highly capable and well regarded, but can he get beyond the bureaucratic Teflon response of “unfortunate oversight”?

Meanwhile, what of Iraq?

There were many good reasons to want Saddam Hussein removed from power: crimes against humanity, particularly the Kurdish people of northern Iraq and the Shiite Muslims of southern Iraq; threats against Israel; previous invasions of Iran and Kuwait; and a brutal regime that applied Silicon Valley-like enthusiasm and innovation to cold-blooded torture and population control. Any and all of these have been used to deflect any sense of hand-wringing or guilt by those who had chosen war once the WMD justification was demonstrated to be a complete fiction.

How many people died in the war that the United Nations declared illegal? Of the Iraqis, the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands, and of US service people, more than 4000 died and about 32,000 were injured.