I found this article from another source which was a very well-written answer to why Australians aren't as angry at their government for having taken them into Iraq as the British people are. It relates to British insecurity in terms of their national identity and so it goes beyond the notion of not wanting dead troops or wasting money.
The article:
"Australians have not demonised John Howard to anywhere near the extent that Britons have demonised Tony Blair over the single issue of the Second Gulf War. People here do not have the Pavlovian reaction “Howard–Iraq”, the way Blair’s entire legacy has become Iraq in the UK.
What is the difference?
A difference, but only a minor difference, is that Howard was a conservative, unadventurous Tory, dedicated to the proposition of making Australia “relaxed and comfortable” after a decade of Labor reform. The Left already despised Howard; they were not going to turn on him because of the lies on WMD and the military adventurism. They already had a heavy backlog of resentments towards him. They did not feel betrayed by one of their own, the way the Left did in the UK (to the extent that New Labour was the Left.)
A minor difference, because foreign policy in Australia is bipartisan, and Labor has long been terrified of being wedged by the Right on foreign policy. (China policy has been a recent exception to bipartisanship, and the emerging rift between the parties on that policy is in itself troubling.) It’s not like a Labor government was ever going to decline to go to war on WMD.
It’s useful to think back to the First Iraq War, when Australia did have a Labor government—albeit a government that pioneered the centrist turn of “New Labour” a decade before the UK. Gareth Evans was foreign minister, and he gave a speech when Parliament was debating joining the war. (Not much of a debate, of course.) And Evans was committed to the allied effort against Saddam Hussein, but he still allowed himself the on-the-record wry aside, “Some might say we are seeking to make the world safe for feudalism”, before going on to say that the war should be joined, not out of Wilsonian interventionism (“make the world safe for democracy”), but to preserve the Westphalian principle of national sovereignty of Kuwait.
Evans allowed himself the wry aside, because as a centre-left internationalist, he wasn’t particularly overjoyed at the prospect of defending Kuwait. He allowed it himself, because he was sympathetic to Wilsonian notions of democracy, and was all too aware of the War For Oil slogans of the Left.
The quixotic Whitlam did pick fights with Nixon, in the previous Australian Labor administration, and flirted with removing the US bases in Australia. The Australian Left has indulged in fantasies that he was toppled by the CIA. Whitlam is a long-distant memory in Australian foreign policy, because it is bipartisan accepted wisdom that Australia, as a minor regional power that feels itself geopolitically exposed, and dependent on America’s nuclear umbrella, doesn’t really have a choice. Even though over the past decade, some pundits have started to grumble that we shouldn’t just pick the US over China reflexively, given how much we depend on trade with China. As indeed we have recently found.
It’s because Australia feels they don’t really have a choice that Hawke and Evans joined the effort to make the world safe for feudalism. It’s because Australia feels they don’t really have a choice that Howard and his own foreign minister Downer acquiesced to the WMD narrative.
And I think that is why Blair is tarred so relentlessly over Iraq, and Howard isn’t. Nobody expected better of Howard, and noone would have expected better had Australia been governed instead by Labor’s Beazley or—heaven help us—the unhinged Latham, who has since turned from socially conservative Labor to screaming White Nationalist. Australia was always going to go along with whatever nonsense the unrepentant Wolfowitz dreamed up. (Last seen grousing they should have stayed for five decades, like in Korea.)
But Blair was different. The UK has a figleaf of an independent foreign policy, and a conceit that the Special Relationship is a partnership of equals. Holt in Australia went “All the way with LBJ” into Vietnam; Wilson in the UK stayed out of it. Blair was not a plodding follower of whatever neocon fantasy Head Office came up with; he was an advocate and a true believer. Australia shrugged off the accusation that we are Australia’s local sheriff: well, yeah, what are ya gonna do. But the accusation that Blair was America’s poodle stung Britain. And what made Britons even more offended is that Blair didn’t go along: he jumped in head first. He bought into the narrative.
Britons expect more of their foreign policy, because of their Great Power legacy, and their ongoing denial that they are subordinate to the Superpower. Australians have no such legacy, and nobody here felt betrayed or let down by Howard. Like I said at the outset: whether you were for him or against him as a prime minister (and I acknowledge my bias), Howard did what everyone expected him to do".
The end.
What do you think?