With dozens of new books on Iraq, we can pause and consider what they tell us is happening and likely to happen.

Taking an economic slant on the alliance with the US, Jock Given’s concise account of the US-Australia ‘Free Trade’ negotiations – written before they ended – warns particularly of the likely effect on cultural production. He advises Australians against abandoning our multilateralist line, and ends by reminding government that it should maximise economic and social opportunity for Australian citizens, and not be seduced into deep integration with the US.

These issues deserve debate, but both those who trust and those who doubt the US alliance do a lot of singing to the choir. In some parts of Australia, it is hard to find anyone in favour of it: in others, anyone against. The facts, to the extent that they are known, seem not to change minds on either side. People seem bafflingly resistant to argument and reliant on instinct. The foreign minister leads the pack in name-calling, motive-imputing and selective quotation of those who disagree with him. Alexander Downer told the National Press Club in November 2003 that such people hated themselves, Australia and the US, without declaring which was the worst offence. Those he named were Phillip Adams, Don Watson, Archbishop Peter Carnley and myself. A more significant challenge comes from writers who, during the course of the war, have actually changed their views. Bishop Tom Frame’s Living by the Sword is a painfully hon­est account of the process, and Owen Harries’s 2003 Boyer Lectures (published under the title Benign or Imperial? Reflections on American Hegimony) give a coolly logical one. Others in this group, such as Paul Kelly and Hugh White, haven’t come out so personally or so far, but they – though not yet Greg Sheridan or Gerard Henderson – seem to be edging back from the precipice.

Not so British journalist and Murdoch biographer William Shawcross, who lucidly makes the case for the war in Allies (Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 275 pp). His argument that Saddam had to go has three legs: that Saddam had the weapons; that he was a tyrant; and that he supported al Qaeda. Sliding smoothly around the lack of legitimacy for depositing him for any of this, he warns that the alternatives are too terrible to contemplate. Blair, he says, had to keep the US engaged in the region, and wanted to bring Europe into the war. For his failure to do so, Shawcross blames the United Nations, the Germans and most of all the French. His distaste for ‘old Europe’ seems greater, if anything, than his loathing of Saddam Hussein. Although he admits that the coalition has made mistakes, Shawcross clings to his double standards: Saddam defies UN resolutions, so he’s good; Saddam’s weapons threaten the region, but those of Israel do not. Writing before Spain’s withdrawal and revelations about torture by US soldiers, he is blithely able to claim that the US has freed Iraq from monstrous tyranny, and has legislated to ensure that human rights abuse there will never be repeated.

Shawcross, who addressed the Sydney Institute in April, has added an introduction to the Australian edition of his book, lavishing praise on John Howard for support the war. If he had not, Australia would have only one mention in the text, merely as one of ‘many other governments’ that thought Bush was right to invade Iraq. The five others Shawcross names are all in Europe.

We know a lot about fighting in British and American wars. Australians are used to taking less credit than our allies for success as well as less responsibility for disasters, and our contributions always count for much more inside Australia than abroad. So what are they worth in Iraq? In Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies (Free Press $39.95 hb, 317 pp), Australia is mentioned only once, when we exasperated the Americans in 1990 by offering F111s for the Gulf War: there was no room for more allies, Cheney said, so ‘stop asking them’. Australia gets several mentions in only one of the three American books about Iraq reviewed here – Bob Woodward’s. But even he, reporting what Bush says to Howard, omits Howard’s replies.

American leaders compete to be interviewed by Woodward. His highly successful formula used about Afghanistan in Bush at War, and now about Iraq in Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, $49.95 hb, 467 pp), involves recording whatever the key participants want to tell him, making no judgments, and smoothing over every negative statement with a positive inference. The Bush administration has expressed pleasure with his account of how they went to war, in the same book that has shocked others by revealing their deceit and disregard of the law.

Although he has thousands of experts who could have given him better advice, Bush gives Woodward his own simplistic rationale for the war: ‘Saddam Hussein is a terrible guy. He’s teaming up with al Qaeda. He tortures his own people and hates Israel.’ Later, he adds, revealing more of his motives: ‘The main goal is not really the return of inspectors to Iraq, but to make sure that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction that could pose a threat to the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] or to Israel.’ In such rushes of rhetoric, precision about who or what really threatens the US is lost. Lies fly thick and fast as the inva­sion approaches, and Rice as­sures Prince Bandar that he’s the only foreigner to know in advance about it. Yet Woodward confirms that Australians and Poles were deployed early in the 48-hour ultimatum period. Howard must have known this, even if Prince Bandar didn’t.

But US leaders are less fearful than ours of speaking freely. Woodward reports Richard Armitage worrying aloud about fighting three wars at once – in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against terrorism – and predicting that the US will pay for ten years or more for Iraq. Powell queries Bush’s assertion that there were 100,000 trained terrorists still at large’, so in his ‘axis of evil’ speech on 29 January 2002 that is changed to ‘tens of thousands’. Powell and Tenet agree with David Kay’s report that the US has been ‘terribly wrong’ about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiled weapons. With such frankness, it’s a pity that Woodward doesn’t put on the record Bush’s statement a few months ago that he stands by everything he says. or Blair’s that responsibility stops with him. It might have set our leaders an example.

Less edifying is Woodward’s account of the CIA s covert operations in northern Iraq before the invasion, where they help sabotage railway lines, and try to assassinate Saddam Hussein. They pay their collaborators with so many $100 bills that hyperinflation breaks out in Sulaymaniyah. Can they have one dollar notes trucked in, the collaborators ask, so a cup of coffee doesn’t cost $100? Then there are the botched attacks on the Dora farmhouse and the Baghdad restaurant, which shocked and awed those killed and injured but missed Saddam Hussein. The world’s leading military technologists deliver some Keystone Kops performances in Iraq.

At their head is Rumsfeld, who distinguished himself in his first stint as secretary of defence by calling his advisors idiots and jerks, and by saying they ought to be ‘hung by their thumbs and balls’. The Abu Ghraib prison pictures come as no surprise, even if all you have seen is the marine boot camp movie Full Metal Jacket. A former boxer, Rumsfeld says: ‘If you don’t know how to move you will get a black eye.’ Rumsfeld appears to have imprinted these ethics on his department. Before the war, Rumsfeld warned the president that it’s a great deal easier to get into something than it is to get out of it: let us now see him try.

Besides Woodward, Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke and James Mann have also published best-sellers that promised insiders’ accounts of the events leading to Iraq. All adopt an intimate, confessional style, so detailed that scarcely a slide is omitted from a power-point presentation, and they write conversations like film scripts. But the O’Neill and Clarke books are much less admired in the White House. Clarke argues from his long experience in security that Americans have deliberately been misled into linking Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda’s attacks, and into believing that Bush is winning against terrorism. The Republicans decided, says Clarke, to wrap them­selves in the flag in the 2002 and 2004 elections, saying a vote for them was a vote against the terrorists: "‘Run on the war" was the direction.’ So America lurched into an ‘entirely irrelevant military adventure against a Muslim nation’. Instead of tackling al Qaeda in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, Clarke says, the US is bogged down in an unnecessary war in Iraq, with the result that a new, tougher al Qaeda has emerged, leaving the US no safer.

Battles over who does what in Washington continue, even in wartime, to be so vicious, Clarke suggests, that al Qaeda looks lean, mean and effective by comparison. Even while he deplores the infighting between the FBI, CIA. Pentagon, White House, State Department and Department of Justice, Clarke takes sides in it himself. He represents himself as a visionary operator, close to power, picking and promoting the right people, and settling scores. Yet he’s not influential enough to appear in the other ‘insider’ writers’ indexes, nor them in his. But his efforts to get terrorism taken seriously are tenacious. With his single-minded focus on al Qaeda as the real threat to America, Clarke comes closer than the others to measuring the precipice and to finding a way off it.

It is a relief to tum to a writer who is concerned about opinions elsewhere in the world, not just the US. George Soros is uniquely placed, having the money, the business expertise and the motivation to create a more constructive vision: others, he says modestly, have some but not all of these assets. The US can lose its world dominance only by its own mistakes, he argues, but if Bush is re­elected, those mistakes will become permanent. So he is campaigning against Bush. There has never been a wider gap between the US and the rest of the world, and Soros says it is the result of Bush’s supremacist ideology – his view that he is right and they are wrong. Soros reads claims that ‘freedom will prevail’ as meaning ‘America will prevail’. The September 11 attacks gave the US an opportunity to change the world for the better, but by declaring war on terrorism and invading Iraq, he says, Bush played into the terrorists’ hands.

Soros proposes a formula for im­proving the world order, an alterna­tive vision of multilateral engagement and preventive action that he has already put into practice through his projects in many countries. He wants greatly increased foreign aid and better international trade rules, with military action as a last resort. He urged renewed attention to the ideas in the UN’s Responsibility to Protect document of 2001, the Millennium Development Goals, and the Warsaw Declaration, which 107 states signed in 2002. Together they could provide a basis for fostering democracy and supporting people whose sovereignty is abused by their leaders, while assuring people in open societies of security and well-being. Whether his proposals work or not. Soros sees such change, and a fundamental revision of America’s role in the world, as the only alternatives to escalating violence.

Australia has, for the first time, invaded a country, uninvited, that did not threaten us or our allies. The Americans are not alone on the precipice. We have put ourselves there with them, and we too have to find a way down. A good way to start would be to decide for ourselves what’s lawful. in our interests. and good for the world, before it’s too late.

Books reviewed:

Against All Enemies:

Inside America’s war on terror

by Richard A. Clarke

Free Press $39.95 hb, 317 pp

America’s Pie:

Trade and culture after 9/11

by Jock Given

UNSW Press, $16.95 pb, 111 pp

Allies:

In the aftermath of the Iraq war

by William Shawcross

Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 275 pp

The Bubble of American Supremacy:

Correcting the misuse of American power

by George Soros

Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 220 pp

Plan of Attack

by Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster, $49.95 hb, 467 pp