MARK RILEY: John Howard reflects on 9/11, the terror attack that changed the course of history

In a secure bunker beneath the Australian embassy in Washington on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, prime minister John Howard took an important briefing from his US ambassador, Michael Thorley.

Thorley had been Howard’s international adviser for many years prior to his posting.

They shared a deep mutual respect.

The ambassador had just been in contact with a White House West Wing that was dealing with the most catastrophic attacks on mainland America in the country’s history.

Thorley told Howard the American response to the hideous terrorist attacks on New York and Washington would likely focus on al-Qaeda.

“He said the White House believed the attack had been organised out of Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden’s name was mentioned,” Howard told me this week.

“The other thing he said to me was he thought this might bring Iraq back onto the table.”

That was on day one. Just hours after the World Trade Centre attacks. Senior people within the Bush White House were already priming to hit Iraq, even though there was no evidence connecting it with the horrific terrorist strikes.

In an interview marking Friday’s 25th anniversary of those epoch-changing events, Howard told me he never thought Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11.

But he shared the Bush administration’s concerns that the “Butcher of Baghdad” did possess weapons of mass destruction and could supply them to rogue terrorist outfits that were determined to turn the “War on Terror” into a cataclysmic third world war.

On March 18, 2003, Howard announced that Australia was going to war in Iraq, joining George W Bush’s Coalition of the Willing.

That decision was based on what he still says was “compelling” intelligence that Saddam was hiding a WMD stockpile that threatened the very stability of the international community.

But he wasn’t.

In the explosive sectarian chaos that engulfed Iraq after the invasion, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that Baghdad had rid itself of its WMD stockpile many years before the Coalition troops attacked.

The intelligence that compelled Bush, Howard and British prime minister Tony Blair to launch that invasion was disastrously wrong.

A quarter of a century later, Howard told me he still believes he wasn’t misled by the US and British intelligence services.

“Oh no, I don’t think I was. ‘Misled’ implies deliberate deceit,” he told me.

“It does,” I replied.

“No. We weren’t deliberately deceived.”

The mountain of international inquiries, committees, reports and conspiracy theories that followed the invasion would suggest that he was.

The dominant belief is that the Bush administration used the shock of 9/11 as a strategic opportunity to complete some unfinished business from George Bush Sr’s time as president to remove Saddam, seize control of Middle Eastern oil reserves and exert US military power and influence across the region.

Howard mounts a forceful counterargument. Why would Tony Blair, a prime minister of the opposing political cloth, so readily commit as many resources and lives as he did to such a cause if he believed it to be a fabricated ideological front?

But there is another question John Howard has never been asked.

What if the intelligence had conveyed him the truth? What if it had told him and Bush and Blair that Saddam didn’t possess WMD?

“Well,” Howard said, crinkling those trademark eyebrows in deep thought.

“If we’d had evidence that strong against the likelihood he possessed them, I think that would have given us pause to think hard about whether to go ahead.”

At 87, he’s finally allowing himself to consider that profound counterfactual possibility.

“That would have been, to my mind and in retrospect, a game changer,” he concedes.

It’s quite an admission.

If the intelligence had been accurate, Operation Iraqi Freedom would likely never have been launched.

That would not have just changed the game but the entire arc of geopolitical history over the past quarter of a century.

The world would look and feel very different. Just how different is wide open to conjecture.

But it is something worth contemplating as Western democracies assess what they have truly achieved amid the massive loss of life on and since September 11 and what still lies ahead in an increasingly uncertain global future that is still emerging from the physical and ideological rubble of that hellish day.

Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s political editor