Former Liberal leader tells ABC program that Australia’s decision to join invasion of Iraq was ‘an embarrassment to all of us’

Former Liberal party leader, John Hewson, says Australia should be embarrassed by its involvement in the Iraq war and was partly responsible for the emergence of Islamic State.

Speaking on the ABC’s Q&A on Monday night, three weeks into the brouhaha over the program’s editorial decisions, Hewson said that the unilateral decision to invade Iraq based on a “very tenuous” connection to al-Qaida allowed for the emergence of a more militant Islamic extremism.

“I have absolutely no doubt that we have ourselves to blame for this,” he said.

“I think that it was a very, very sorry period in international history and Australia’s role in that, I think, should be an embarrassment to all of us.”

Hewson said that while there might be a moral argument to justify Australia’s recently expanded involvement in Iraq to address the threat posed by Isis, it could be a slippery slope that saw the country “implicitly committing ourselves to escalating involvement”.

Cabinet approved plans in March to send an extra 300 soldiers to Iraq to help train forces fighting Isis militants.

Fellow panellist Michael Ware, an Australian journalist who reported on the Iraq war for Time magazine and CNN, said “inadvertently, mistakenly, unwittingly, we unleashed the Islamic State upon the region and upon ourselves”.

But he said increased efforts of Australia and the US were “not going to make the slightest dent on Islamic State”.

“The real battlefield where the war with Islamic State will be won or lost will be the battlefield of ideas,” Ware said. “We need to come up with a better alternative, as something that provides more opportunity, that has greater appeal, than the dark idea of Islamic State that continues to lure thousands and thousands and thousands of replacement troops. They haven’t lost any numbers because as quick as we can kill them, they’re replacing them.”

Hewson was the sole Liberal representative on the panel in the absence of the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who pulled out of Q&A in accordance with Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s ban on frontbench ministers appearing on the program and instead appeared on 7.30, where he talked about Q&A.

Labor MP Amanda Rishworth; the director of the Lowy Institute’s polling program, Alex Oliver; and John Stackhouse, a religious scholar from Canada’s Crandall University, joined Hewson and Ware on the panel.

Turnbull declined to endorse the veto in an interview with 7.30, saying “wherever there is an open microphone I’m happy to get on the other side of it and express my views”, but said that Abbott was “the boss”.

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Abbott has written to the ABC to say he would lift the ban, instituted in response to former terrorism suspect Zaky Mallah being allowed to ask a live question from the audience, if the program was moved from the television division of the ABC to the news and current affairs division.

Mallah, who was acquitted of two terrorism offences in 2005 but pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Asio officers, caused controversy by accusing Coalition MP Steve Ciobo of giving Australian Muslims an incentive to join Isis.

The meta discussion of Q&A on Q&A continued via a video question from an erudite child, who said he had spent the school holidays watching films about Nazi Germany and was now concerned about perceived restrictions of free speech.

“I know I’m only 10, but Tony Abbott scares me when he attacks the ABC and tries to see what we should see on it. Should I be afraid of his attacks on Q&A and the ABC, both things I love?” he asked.

Ware, who reported on the Iraq war for Time magazine and CNN, said mainstream Australia needed to understand where people like Mallah were coming from, and there was value in letting them speak.

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“If we don’t have people like Zaky Mallah on a show like this that’s quite responsibly run and is quite a sophisticated forum, then when are we going to hear their voices?” he said.

“If you [as the government] want the Australian people to support what you’re trying to do with combatting these threats, then let’s hear from some of the these voices in some of these forums and they’ll do all the work you need them to do to get the Australian people to understand why we have to do this.”

Hewson said he was “staggered” the skirmish had gone on as long as it had and said the fault lay with both the ABC and the Abbott government.

“The first law of digging holes is when you get to the bottom you stop digging,” he said. “And you guys kept digging on both sides, and you’re still digging.”