No act of a national government is more momentous than the decision to commit the nation to war. That is why the constitutions of many countries - though not of Australia - require the government to obtain the consent of parliament before doing so. And in the past decade, no military action has aroused more opposition within the countries supporting it than the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led ''coalition of the willing''. In Australia, the Howard government's decision to participate in the coalition sparked rallies and street marches on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War.
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The remarkable thing about the Chilcot inquiry for Australians, however, is that it is being held at all. Australia has not conducted its own inquiry and does not seem likely to do so, yet the war was as divisive here as it was in Britain. The questions raised at the time about the evidence on which the Howard government relied in making its decision, about the kinds of pressure that may have been exerted on it by the Bush administration, and about its readiness to accept US assurances of the war's legality have never been satisfactorily answered.The Rudd Government's lack of interest in allowing the record to be set straight publicly cannot arise from any bipartisanship about the war, because Labor opposed the invasion. Trade Minister Simon Crean, who was opposition leader in 2003, was criticised at the time for telling troops about to leave for the Gulf that the opposition did not believe they should be going. Such criticism now seems like one more attempt to stifle debate about the war, and Mr Crean's remarks are acknowledged as a brave refusal to be browbeaten into silence.
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