Vale Simon Crean — a study in what happens to those who tell the truth

Most obituaries for Labor and union veteran Simon Crean have rightly devoted considerable space to his decision to oppose Australia’s involvement in the Bush-Blair invasion and occupation of Iraq, rather than his failed stint as opposition leader between 2001 and 2003.

After replacing Kim Beazley as Labor leader following the 2001 election, Crean failed to get any traction against John Howard. He struggled to lift Labor’s primary level of support and only once pushed his party ahead in two-party-preferred terms — ironically not long before he resigned as leader in late 2003.

The greater damage, however, was in Crean’s promotion of Mark Latham — who he had brought back to the frontbench — to shadow treasurer and his support for Latham to head off Beazley’s return following his resignation. Latham’s disastrous performance at the 2004 election, which delivered Howard a Senate majority, was one of Crean’s legacies.

It was echoed in early 2013 when Crean — on a day supposedly devoted to Julia Gillard’s apology to the victims of forced adoption — suddenly announced he wanted Kevin Rudd to run for the Labor leadership against Gillard. Rudd duly declined, emphasising what a farce Labor had become amid incessant undermining of Gillard by Rudd supporters.

But it’s for the Iraq disaster that Crean deserves to be remembered — both for his own principled stand and as a demonstration of just how truly evil the Howard government and Murdoch media were.

Fewer than 20 years later, it’s easily forgotten how tumultuous the decision by Howard to join the illegal attack on Iraq was. It made hundreds of thousands of Australians march against a decision that had no international legitimacy and that — exactly as its opponents said at the time — was clear would lead to strategic disaster and catastrophic loss of life.

The attack and the utterly botched occupation that followed led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, horrific war crimes by Western forces and a surge in terrorist attacks across the West that claimed hundreds of lives, spawned horrific extremist groups like the Islamic State, and carried the war into a second decade in other countries. It was based, as we knew at the time, on a deliberate, clear lie about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.

The perpetrators of the war — Bush, Blair, their senior officials and second-tier lapdogs like “deputy sheriff” Howard and Alexander Downer — have never been held to account for either the lies or the disaster they caused. Nor have their media enablers, especially Rupert Murdoch. Recall that literally every News Corp masthead in the world bar one enthusiastically supported the war — which Murdoch, with his usual uncanny insight into world affairs, claimed would deliver oil at $20 a barrel.

Crean’s opposition was exactly right, and he has been vindicated in the years following. Those who opposed him, including senior Labor Party figures like Beazley, who believed we needed to follow the US wherever it went, have been proven massively, tragically wrong.

But at the time, the smearing and demonisation of Crean was astonishing. Downer suggested he was an appeaser who was “talking like Saddam Hussein”. Andrew Bolt called Crean “Chamberlain”. The Australian and other News Corp shitsheets ran editorial after editorial, op-ed after op-ed, vilifying Crean — who according to The Australian would forever be “associated with the appeasement of tyranny” — and Labor. The Bush administration leaked that it wanted to avoid Crean meeting Bush when the latter visited Australia — one of many blatant interventions in Australian domestic politics that went unchallenged by Howard and Downer.

If there was a shred of decency at News Corp or within the Coalition, any mention of Crean today would be accompanied by a grovelling apology.

The savaging of Crean in the name of an illegal war based on a lie shouldn’t be allowed to recede into political and media history. It’s a vivid demonstration of what can be done to someone who opposes an abhorrent strategy backed by the world’s most powerful media company and political parties using war and terrorism purely for political purposes. That Crean has passed too young while perpetrators continue to avoid accountability for Iraq adds an especially sad note to his death.