On Borrowed Time Page 9

  Keith Windschuttle is not a fool. In his attack on earlier scholarship he landed some powerful blows. Nonetheless, the scholarship displayed in Fabrication was frequently of an altogether risible kind. Windschuttle argued that the Aboriginal Tasmanians had no concept of land or property. As Henry Reynolds has pointed out, he was unaware that the most important Tasmanian Aboriginal dictionary lists no fewer than twenty words for “country”. To show that the Tasmanian Aborigines had no grounds for complaint over food supply, Windschuttle argued that the British settlers stopped hunting native birds and animals in 1811. As James Boyce has shown, in fact an orgy of hunting continued for decades longer. Most importantly of all, Windschuttle’s claim that it is “clear” that a mere 118 Aborigines died a violent death at British hands (later revised to 120) is based on two propositions that would not pass the historian’s “laugh test”, namely that every Aboriginal death at British settler hands must be recorded in an extant document and that, after battle, no Aborigine ever died of wounds.

  Even worse than the inadequacy of the scholarship, however, was the complete absence in Windschuttle of a sense of tragedy in the telling of his story, which gave the book a coldness. Compare words taken from the concluding passage in John West’s A History of Tasmania published in 1852 with a concluding passage of Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

  [The colonists] are charmed by their simplicity; they sleep among them without fear: but these notes soon change; and passing from censure to hatred, they speak of them as improvident, importunate, and intrusive; as rapacious and mischievous; then as treacherous and blood-thirsty … At length the secret comes out; the tribe which welcomed the first settler with shouts and dancing … has ceased to live … It was, indeed, a mournful spectacle: the last Tasmanian quitting the shores of his ancestors! Forty years before, the first settler had erected his encampment! A change so rapid in the relations of a people to the soil, will scarcely find a parallel in this world’s history …

  – John West

  [W]e should see them as active agents of their own demise … The real tragedy of the Aborigines was not British colonization per se but that their society was, on the one hand, so internally dysfunctional and, on the other hand, so incompatible with the looming presence of the rest of the world … They had survived for millennia it is true, but it seems clear that this owed more to good fortune than to good management. The “slow strangulation of the mind” was true not only of their technical abilities but also of their social relationships. Hence, it was not surprising that when the British arrived, this small, precarious society quickly collapsed under the dual weight of the susceptibility of its members to disease and the abuse and neglect of its women.

  – Keith Windschuttle

  It is very unusual for books in the humanities to become topics of the kind of extended national conversation only daily newspapers can sustain. Windschuttle’s scholarship was slipshod. His understanding of the tragedy that had overtaken the Indigenous people of Tasmania compared unfavourably with a book written a century and a half earlier. Its enthusiastic reception needs to be explained.

  The process of turning Fabrication into a major national event began at Chris Mitchell’s Australian. On the eve of its publication, Bernard Lane, the journalist assigned to cover the controversy, penned a flattering portrait of Windschuttle. This was followed by a column in which Windschuttle outlined his views. When Windschuttle’s book was launched by Professor Claudio Veliz, the Australian reported his speech uncritically, including his remark that in comparison with the brutality of the wars against the indigenous people waged by the Spaniards in Latin America the destruction of Aboriginal society had been like a “nun’s picnic”. The Australian reported a quotation in one of the books by Henry Reynolds that had been badly mangled, a point Reynolds readily conceded. The Australian (and not only it) pursued the claims Windschuttle made against Lyndall Ryan with partisan ferocity. Lane approached the vice chancellor of Ryan’s university and her publisher, Allen & Unwin, asking them whether they intended to take action against their employee and their author. It turned out they did not, although posing the question undoubtedly affected her reputation.

  The Australian had clearly made a decision to host a protracted debate on the worth of Fabrication. In the year following its publication, opinion columns and reviews were published on both sides of the debate in roughly equal number – on the one side Keith Windschuttle (on three occasions), Roger Sandall, Peter Ryan, Geoffrey Blainey, Frank Devine (twice), Peter Coleman and Janet Albrechtsen; on the other, Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan, Bain Attwood, Dirk Moses, Stephen Foster, Martin Krygier with Robert van Krieken, and James Boyce.

  By this time the Australian’s own position on the Windschuttle controversy it had provoked was clear. Fabrication was in its opinion a highly significant work of history which had mounted a formidable challenge to the idea of colonial genocide in the foundation of Australia. As such, it had acted as a much-needed corrective to the exaggerated black-armband view of Australian history. In addition it had exposed the slovenly standards and the left-wing bias of humanities scholars in Australian universities. The Australian published a letter signed by Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall, which expressed regret about the willingness of the Australian to foster a debate on so reactionary a book. In their typical “censorious” fashion, the Australian argued, left-wing academics were trying to close down significant national debates. According to the editorial line of the Australian, if Fabrication had a fault, it was mainly one of “tone” – a failure to recognise that there was a tragic dimension in the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

  Although the Australian had invited serious historical rejoinders to the questions raised by Fabrication, as soon as Whitewash, a critical anthology I had edited, was published, the project was characterised as the raising of a “posse” in an ad hominem bid to silence dissent. “The response of the academic establishment to Windschuttle’s work,” the Australian editorialised, “has been lamentable. It is supposed to be right-wing columnists who ‘hunt in packs’ but left-wing academics have done themselves proud with Whitewash in which 19 of them launch into Windschuttle’s supposed failings as a historian and a human being.”

  The role of the Australian in the creation of the Windschuttle debate can be demonstrated in the following way. Following Fabrication, Windschuttle published two further books: the first a revisionist history trying to prove that the White Australia policy did not involve racism, the second trying to demonstrate that the idea of the Stolen Generations was a myth. Because the Australian did not endorse them, both had minimal impact on the national imagination and the national debate. Yet because of its editorial enthusiasm for Fabrication, within a year of the book’s publication the Australian had turned Keith Windschuttle into a figure of national significance. Conservative Australians, including both John Howard and Tony Abbott, now embraced Windschuttle’s fundamental conclusion, namely that the injustice of the Indigenous dispossession had been wildly exaggerated by left-wing academics. In recognition of his significance as a cultural warrior, Howard appointed Windschuttle to the board of the ABC. Windschuttle understood what he owed to the Australian. At the launch of Fabrication he expressed surprise and gratitude at the early reception of his book by the press. And in a speech to a Quadrant gathering in 2007 he spoke of “Chris Mitchell’s elevation to the editorship of the Australian” as one of the turning points in the Australian culture war, or as he put it, “one of the milestones in the process” whereby “a whole range of issues that had previously been taboo in mainstream publishing got an airing at last”.

  In an interview with me, Chris Mitchell claimed his personal relations with Windschuttle were remote and that his paper could not have maintained a prolonged debate about Fabrication or indeed any other topic in a social vacuum. Perhaps not. But the Australian had encouraged a debate about a book which had spoken of the kindness of the colonisers responsible f
or the deaths of almost all the Tasmanian Aborigines in the space of three decades, and which had characterised the victims as common criminals and as the agents of their own demise. Fabrication represented a kind of malign landmark in the intellectual history of Australia – a moment when the hard-won achievement of the generation of historians who built on the achievement of W.E.H. Stanner, C.D. Rowley and Henry Reynolds in opening eyes to the tragedy of the Aboriginal dispossession was called into question. Because of the decision taken by the Australian to host the Windschuttle debate, the character of the nation was subtly but significantly changed.

  THE IRAQ INVASION: “AN OPEN AND SHUT CASE”

  An alliance of neo-conservatives and right-wing nationalists formed during the Clinton presidency. They were appointed to several key strategic positions inside the George W. Bush administration by Vice-President Dick Cheney. Following the terrorist atrocity of September 11, this group began to drive the United States towards war with Iraq. About all this there was something exceedingly strange. September 11 was exclusively the work of al-Qaeda, which was based in Afghanistan. Iraq was not involved. To decide to attack Iraq following 9/11 was, as the American security chief Richard A. Clarke once observed, like deciding to attack Mexico as a reprisal for Pearl Harbor.

  The key facts concerning Iraq were these. After Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990, a US-led United Nations force drove it out. At this time Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons, so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Between 1991 and 1998 UN weapons inspectors were involved in the process of discovering and destroying Iraq’s WMD arsenal. When, following political conflict, the inspectors left in 1998, parts of the arsenal remained unaccounted for. Following 9/11 the Cheney group in the Pentagon and the State Department succeeded in convincing the president to invade Iraq. The argument of the war party in Washington went like this. Saddam Hussein already possessed chemical and biological weapons. He was certain to succeed in building nuclear weapons soon. Saddam was not merely a vicious tyrant. He led a regime that was officially described as a “rogue state”. Rogue-state leaders such as Saddam were so irrational that they could not be “contained” by the threat of superior force in the way all Soviet leaders from Stalin to Brezhnev had been during the Cold War. Rather, Saddam was likely to use his WMD either directly, by waging war on Israel or Kuwait and then holding the world to ransom, or indirectly, by handing such weapons to al-Qaeda or a similar terrorist movement which might then mount a surprise 9/11-style attack on the United States or one of its allies. In either case, before the attacks there would be no warning. For this reason the United States was obliged to mount what was called a pre-emptive strike but which was in reality a preventive war, something which even the most hawkish US strategists at the height of the Cold War regarded as “unthinkable” and “repugnant”.

  In March 2003 the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia waged a preventive war without the support of the UN Security Council. Following the invasion, hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children lost their lives and millions were displaced. As it turned out, the base claim of the Washington war party was false. Iraq possessed no WMD. The string of questionable, indeed highly implausible, assumptions about Saddam Hussein’s likely behaviour, which was used to justify waging war, thus fell to the ground. The Iraq War is one of the greatest tragedies and scandals of contemporary history.

  Rupert Murdoch was so close to the war leaders that in the days before the invasion, Tony Blair telephoned him on three occasions. Nor was his support merely personal. After the invasion Roy Greenslade of the Guardian investigated the editorial line of all 175 Murdoch newspapers around the globe. He found that each one had supported the invasion. This was not merely a question of editors intuitively grasping their owner’s will. As I discovered during a trip to Tasmania after the invasion, for a brief time in 2002 one of Murdoch’s papers, the Hobart Mercury, wrote anti-war editorials. It toed the Murdoch line only after a warning letter came from News Limited’s Australian head office. Nor did Murdoch bother to disguise his determination to mobilise his media empire on behalf of the Iraq War. On 18 February 2003, he told the Bulletin: “We can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam … I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly, and I think he is going to go on with it.” Eighteen months later, in his typical lapidary manner, Murdoch informed an ABC journalist, “With our newspapers we have indeed supported Bush’s foreign policy. And we remain committed that way.”

  The Australian is Murdoch’s most important vehicle for influencing Australian politics. It is unthinkable that it could have been anti-war. Given all this, even if an enthusiastic neo-conservative like Chris Mitchell had not been appointed editor-in-chief during the build-up to war, the Australian would have supported the Iraq invasion. On this question, Murdoch’s newspapers did not exercise autonomy.

  I must add a significant caveat here. At the time of the invasion of Iraq the editor of the opinion pages was Tom Switzer, a disciple of Owen Harries, the Australian editor of the US journal the National Interest and a conservative foreign-policy realist. Switzer was opposed to the invasion. According to his count, between July 2002 and March 2003 the Australian ran “45 dovish … and 47 hawkish” opinion columns. Although in my review this undercounts the explicitly and implicitly pro-war pieces by at least twenty, it is still true that before the invasion the only reasonably balanced section of the paper was the opinion page. Everywhere else the paper overwhelmingly supported it. This was the reason why, in March 2006, John Howard said that Chris Mitchell’s Australian had been “a very strong supporter of our military operations in Iraq”.

  However, it is not so much the fact of that support but its tone that is significant and revealing. These qualities are best demonstrated by a study of the Mitchell-inspired editorials and the commentaries of the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan.

  Throughout the build-up to war the Australian’s leader articles and the Sheridan commentaries supported without question every aspect of the official line of the Washington war party. The evidence was incontrovertible that Iraq presently possessed chemical and biological WMD and was very close to possessing nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein did indeed pose a danger to the world in our era of a kind similar to the threat of Hitler in the 1930s. As a consequence it was gravest folly to “appease” him. It might have been “noble” for the Americans and the British to try to win the support of the UN Security Council before the invasion, but from the legal and political point of view that was unnecessary. There was indeed a very real danger that Saddam Hussein might suddenly invade Kuwait or launch an unprovoked attack on Israel. There was an equally real danger that he might hand his WMD to al-Qaeda or a similar terrorist group. Even though the new US strategic doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, which justified waging war on the basis of an imagined future threat, clearly represented a revolution in international law, it was supported in the Australian’s leaders and the Sheridan pre-war commentaries as if it was altogether unremarkable and the merest common sense.

  Every part of this case was wrong or dangerous. Yet the errors of judgement were not the most damaging dimension of the Australian’s editorial argument for the invasion of Iraq. More damaging was the attempt to create an atmosphere where cautious considerations of facts and arguments were seen as examples of stupidity, or as the betrayal of the national interest, or as ideological blindness. Examination of one pre-war Sheridan commentary and one Mitchell-inspired leader is the best way to reveal the overweeningly self-confident, uncritical, unreflective and bullying style because of which – on the question of the invasion of Iraq and so many other critical international and national questions over the past ten years – the possibility of a sober national debate was made more difficult.

  In September 2002 Tony Blair released his government’s dossier on Iraq’s WMD. As it happens, everything contained in it turned out to be entirely false. But that is not my
point. Upon its release no one outside the intelligence world, and perhaps few inside it, was in any position to judge its accuracy. The task of journalists was to inform citizens of its content and to pose critical questions about the potential problems of this kind of intelligence information. Here, however, is what Sheridan wrote.

  “The Blair dossier should transform the debate over the Iraq threat. Either Tony Blair is a monstrous liar or Saddam Hussein is. Take your pick.” The dossier was “telling and sober”. Hussein had “never at any stage since the Gulf War … given up his program to acquire WMDs”. Presently he possessed “substantial biological and chemical weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes”. He was also “continuing his nuclear weapons programs apace” and was “one or two years away from producing nuclear weapons”. Saddam Hussein had learned from previous experience how to hide his weapons from inspectors. Accordingly their return would most likely be valueless. Sheridan’s “inescapable conclusion” was that “inspections are not workable”. The only way war could be avoided now was for Saddam Hussein to reveal his weapons and destroy them in full public view. “Anything less and he is, as usual, just jerking the UN’s chain, all the while moving closer to his goal of nuclear dominance of the Middle East.”

  This was not an analysis of the Blair dossier. Not only did Sheridan take every claim made by Blair on trust. Not only did he pose no critical questions about the dossier. Implicitly, by asking readers to choose whether it was Tony Blair or Saddam Hussein who was a “monstrous liar”, he treated anyone with doubts about WMD as a conscious or unconscious dupe of the dictator. Moreover Sheridan outbid even the formal case of the war party in Washington. For him the total cooperation of the Saddam Hussein regime in the weapons inspection process was insufficient. So certain was he that Saddam possessed a vast WMD arsenal, so convinced was he of the capacity of Saddam to deceive the UN weapons inspectors, that the only means by which Saddam could avoid war was to destroy his arsenal himself. What Sheridan’s logic entailed was that if Iraq had no WMD to destroy, it had to be invaded. In this article Sheridan mocked the arguments of the anti-war Labor Left as “the shrill and politically semi-literate anti-Americanism of those hitherto hidden Metternichs”. In another article of this time he suggested that anyone who thought that Saddam Hussein might be telling the truth about his WMD was in need of immediate psychiatric assistance. Throughout the period leading to the invasion of Iraq, Sheridan did not write reports or analysis. With considerable rhetorical skill, with an entire absence of self-doubt, with a total contempt for those with whom he disagreed and a fawning infatuation with those Americans of the war party, like Paul Wolfowitz or Rich Armitage, who granted him interviews – he used his journalism for one purpose only, to beat the drum of war.