I went to a Lowy Institute seminar which, from left, right and centre, was basically a ‘Bag Bush’ fest over Iraq. The most common theme was how naïve, innocent and foolish the Americans were to have this ideal of supporting liberty around the world: that this could not be a basis for foreign policy; and that in this world you had to be realistic and promote stability as the key.

Of all people, Robert Manne^[7] gave a lecture on the importance of the Treaty of Westphalia which established the principle of national sovereignty. I recall that the Soviet Union used to quote the Treaty of Westphalia to me when we used to raise human rights issues with them. Every crummy dictator around the world used to give us lectures about the principles of mutual respect, sovereignty, independence and non-interference in internal affairs, the codeword being ‘let us murder our people without you saying anything’. I was not particularly persuaded by that argument.

The other idea that was repeatedly referred to was ‘containment’. Couldn’t we have contained Iraq as we had done successfully with the Soviet Union, went the argument. Some success — sanctions in Iraq were supposed to contain Iraq, but became a complete shambles as the Chinese, Russians and especially the French, cheated on them as fast as they could go. What I had not realised is that an Australian company was a big cheater too.

People kept quoting the case of the Soviet Union, which they said had been successfully contained for more than 40 years after World War II, without the risks we were taking with Iraq. But part of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union were doctrines called ‘mutually assured destruction’ and ‘extended deterrence’. Under the principles of containment, it was policy that if the Soviet Union attacked the United States or Western Europe, or us, or Japan, by conventional means, the United States would respond with a nuclear attack which would undoubtedly bring a nuclear attack on the United States and the rest of us.

It seems to me that this was far less realist, far less cautious or pragmatic and non-idealistic than anything Bush has ever proposed. Huge risks were taken in the name of containment, not only in the early 1960s, but in early 1983 when, during Exercise Archer in Western Europe, the Soviets misread all the signals and thought the Americans and Western Europeans were about to launch an attack on them. So every time I hear that containment was such a moderate, cautious, sensible policy in pursuit of a great principle — we were not going to let Western Europe be taken over; we were not going to let the Soviet Union run large parts of the world — I am reminded that huge risks were taken which, fortunately, for us all never eventuated.

The pursuit of stability has been a highly sterile policy. It was stability that led us to support Iraq against Iran.

You have got to have clear ideals — and just because George Bush said it, does not mean it is not true. His second inaugural address was one of the great modern speeches you will read. But nobody took any notice of it because it was viewed through the prism of ‘pre-emption’, Iraq, aggressive cowboy-style language, language he has the good sense now to regret that he used. If you go back and read it now, it was fantastic — great ideals, full of humility, but by that time it was too late. Bush had lost that battle.