How was Howard's war possible? Winning the war of position over Iraq

Abstract

While a range of accounts have engaged with the important question of why Australia participated in military intervention in Iraq, few analyses have addressed the crucial question of how this participation was possible. Employing critical constructivist insights regarding security as a site of contestation and negotiation, this article focuses on the ways in which the Howard Government was able to legitimise Australian involvement in war in Iraq without a significant loss of political legitimacy. We argue that Howard was able to ‘win’ the ‘war of position’ over Iraq through persuasively linking intervention to resonant Australian values, and through marginalising alternatives to war and the actors articulating them.

Notes

1. Indeed, a range of accounts suggest that Howard was able to escape much of the political fall-out of the Iraq War because of Australia's low casualty rate as the insurgency developed (see, for example, Bell 2007: 40–2).

2. While this foreign/security policy orientation is defined here in terms of a particular conception of Australian identity, Wesley and Warren (2000) define this orientation in foreign policy terms as illustrative of the dominance of a particular (traditionalist) current of thought in Australian foreign and security policy.

3. Indeed, even for many sympathetic to the idea of security as a social construction in which language is central, security is spoken from a certain place, ‘by elites’ (Wæver 1995).

4. We are particularly grateful for the insights of the anonymous reviewer on this point.

5. In both strategies, the Howard government's response was broadly similar to that of Tony Blair in the United Kingdom. Blair invoked arguments that he had earlier used in the case of NATO intervention in Kosovo concerning the possibility of legitimate action in the face of an ‘unreasonable veto’ or the threat thereof (see Ralph 2007), while also suggesting that the French were ultimately to blame for the failure to achieve a second UN Security Council resolution (Kampfner 2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matt McDonald

Matt McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. His research interests are in the area of critical approaches to security and their application to environmental change, Australian foreign and security policy, the ‘war on terror’ and security dynamics in the Asia-Pacific. He has published on these themes in a range of journals and is editor (with Anthony Burke) of Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (Manchester University Press, 2007)

Matt Merefield

Matt Merefield is an Honorary research fellow at CREAM (Centre for Race, Ethnicity and Migration) at City University and a research assistant at the Research, Information, and Policy Unit and the Immigration Advisory Service. His research interests are in the areas of asylum, deportation, and post-return monitoring. His most recent publication examines the colonial-liberal bio-politics of mobility and development