MAJOR PROBLEMS

I have up to now refrained from commenting on Major Peter Tinley's recent comments regarding Australia's involvement in Iraq but since he has announced his intention to stand for federal parliament I think it now appropriate to comment.

Today at work a colleague and I (he's a former Australian army officer; I was a lieutenant in the USN) briefly discussed Tinley's comments. We agreed that his comments were nothing more than opinion and should not have been voiced publicly -- it's just not the done thing for ex-officers to voice such unsubstantiated commentary.

More worrying than Tinley (perhaps inappropriately) exercising his freedom to speak is his apparent hypocrisy. Last night in his long segment on Lateline he said:

I think the reasons that we went to war in Iraq were baseless. The Government sent us there under the idea of looking for weapons of mass destruction and they gave us the impression that there was a clear and imminent danger of them being used. We now know through our own tactical search on the ground in Iraq and certainly from the Iraq Survey Group, that that was not true at all.

This is somewhat at odds with his previous contention that he knew (through his high level access to intelligence) prior to the invasion that Iraq had no WMD:

"I couldn't find any direct actionable intelligence linking any of the areas we were looking at in the west with WMD," he tells Inquirer. "We were looking from just west of Baghdad all the way through to the Jordanian border and between the Syrian and Saudi borders. When I pressed them (US intelligence) for more specific imagery or information regarding locations or likely locations of WMD, they confessed, off the record, that there had not been any tangible siting of any WMD or WMD-enabling equipment for some years. It was all shadows and inferenced conversations between Iraqis. [There is no such thing in the military as "off the record," as Tinley proves in referring to an "off the record" conversation - Ed.]

"There was an overwhelming desire for all of the planning staff to simply believe that the Iraqis had learned how to conceal their WMD assets away from the US assets."

The result, Tinley says, was that the Australian taskforce never really took the WMD search seriously, even though it had specialist combat engineers trained in search and containment.

Yet Tinley apparently voiced no objections to his superiors about going to war based on lies, and certainly didn't go public. It's even conceivable that strong enough objections from Tinley might have preempted the involvement he now condemns.

Did Tinley really know the war was groundless (with him participating only because he was following orders) or was the WMD situation possibly not as clear cut as he now presents it? Either way, he could suffer some serious blowback. Welcome to the world of politics.