Australia wanted the United Nations to play a bigger role in the reconstruction of Iraq after the 2003 invasion but was rebuffed by the Bush administration, a declassified report reveals.
The 572-page report written by a senior scholar at the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis and obtained under freedom of information laws says the then Howard government even discussed limiting Australia's military contribution to the post-invasion phase to positions under the UN.
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The revelation is significant because the United States' poor post-invasion planning is widely blamed for the downward spiral Iraq plunged into which is still being felt today in the country's sectarian fracturing and the success of the Islamic State terror group.
"Australia also had a preference for the United Nations to have a large role in the rehabilitation of post-war Iraq," the report by Dr Albert Palazzo states.
![An American soldier in Baghdad in 2003.](/web/20170308015311im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/l/4/f/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gukyes.png/1488148174760.jpg)
"The United States, however, did not share Australia's enthusiasm for the United Nations having a significant Phase IV [the post-invasion phase] presence. Australian planners were well aware of the Bush administration's scepticism towards the international body, but hoped to persuade the Bush administration to accept a larger UN role."
They were unsuccessful, Dr Palazzo writes, citing internal Defence briefs dated February 11 and March 3, 2003, ahead of the invasion which began March 20.
The report goes on that Washington "objected to the possibility of the international organisation having a high profile role in Iraq's administration".
That the Howard government wanted greater UN involvement underscores how the outcome of the Iraq war could have been different.
![Hundreds of brick ovens creating the bricks needed for the rebuilding of Iraq in 2003.](/web/20170308015311im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/l/4/f/t/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gukyes.png/1488148174760.jpg)
The Bush administration's handling of post-invasion period, led by then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and with the significant influence of vice president Dick Cheney, is almost universally regarded today as a disaster. The Pentagon wrested control of the reconstruction from the US State Department but was not interested in nation-building and did not believe it would be necessary.
The fall of Saddam Hussein's regime was swiftly followed by massive looting and mob violence which destroyed the Baghdad's infrastructure and institutions, but which US troops made no attempts to stop because they had not been ordered to do so.
![Two workers high above the Arahman Mosque being constructed in Baghdad in 2003.](/web/20170308015311im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/l/4/f/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gukyes.png/1488148174760.jpg)
Dr Palazzo, who interviewed more than 75 key Australian players involved in the war and scoured classified documents, writes that Rumsfeld's resistance to putting more US troops into Iraq allowed the lawlessness to take hold.
Worse, Paul Bremer who in May was appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority and ruled the country by decree, made what Dr Palazzo describes as "the two fatal decisions that helped to transform the criminal instability then widespread in Baghdad into a political insurgency against the United States and the nascent Iraqi state".
Mr Bremer outlawed Hussein's ruling Baath Party and dissolved the Iraqi army.
The first order "put 50,000 bureaucrats, managers and technocrats out of work" and caused the country to grind to a halt. The second "put onto the street 700,000 armed, humiliated and unemployed men" who seeded the insurgency.
Dr Palazzo writes that "there was even some discussion within the Howard government to limiting Australia's contribution to Phase IV to the provision of specialists to key positions in a UN mission for Iraq, particularly in areas which promised to secure Australia's long-term interests, for example in trade."
But Australia's "balancing its support to the United States and the United Nations would soon become moot", he writes, when terrorists blew up the Baghdad UN office in August 2003, killing top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and prompting the international organisation to withdraw most of its staff.