Tanya Plibersek is the Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) Opposition.
Tanya Plibersek MP, Speech to the House of Representatives, 17 September 2002: “I do not support an attack on Iraq. I particularly do not support a pre-emptive first strike. Nor do I support any action that is initiated by the US alone rather than being sanctioned by the United Nations. I welcome Iraq's agreement today to allow unconditional access to United Nations weapons inspectors…
UN figures from 2001 state that 60 per cent of the population have no regular access to clean water. Malnutrition was and is chronic. Before the war, the gross national product of Iraq was $US3,000 a year per capita; now it is $US500 a year per capita, making Iraq one of the poorest nations on earth. In 2000, Columbia University Professor Richard Garfield estimated that there were 300,000 excess deaths of children under the age of five since the Gulf War. In 1997, UNICEF reported that 4,500 children under the age of five were dying every month from hunger and disease. The food for oil deal to ease sanctions improved that situation slightly. My concern for Iraqi civilians is the first reason I have for opposing armed conflict in the area. The second reason is I believe that, in this matter as in most others, the US response is governed by self-interest and not by universal principles. This leads to hypocrisy. I can think of a rogue state which consistently ignores UN resolutions, whose ruler is a war criminal responsible for the massacres of civilians in refugee camps outside its borders. The US supports and funds this country. This year it gave it a blank cheque to continue its repression of its enemies. It uses US military hardware to bulldoze homes and kill civilians. It is called Israel, and the war criminal is Ariel Sharon. Needless to say, the US does not mention the UN resolutions that Israel has ignored for 30 years; it just continues sending the money. The US is also hypocritical in its criticism of the lack of democracy in Iraq. None of the Arab allies which the US seeks to cultivate is a democracy. The US says that Saddam must be destroyed because he has abused the human rights of his own citizens, including those from ethnic minorities such as the Kurds. The US has conveniently forgotten that the regimes it has installed and supported—the Pinochet regime in Chile, to name but one—have abducted and murdered citizens of their own. The US has ignored the ethnic cleansing carried out by Turkey against the Kurds. In fact, Turkey is a valued member of NATO and a likely starter for the European Union. The US and most European countries were great supporters of the Suharto regime which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. The US originally went to war with Iraq, a country it had previously supported as a bulwark against Iran and communism, because it invaded Kuwait. As Tariq Ali says in The Clash of Fundamentalism: “Iraq's seizure of Kuwait was not in the West's interests, since it posed the threat that two-fifths of the world's oil reserves would be controlled by a modern Arab state with an independent foreign policy, unlike the feudal dependencies of the West in Kuwait and the Gulf of Saudi Arabia” (Tanya Plibersek, Speech to the House of Representatives, 17 September 2002, Hansard: http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/genpdf/chamber/hansardr/2002-09-17/0075/hansard_frag.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf ).