EDITORIAL
Break the Australia-US alliance!
16 February 2007
PM John Howard is facing an election later this year and knows that his government’s support for Washington’s war in Iraq is highly unpopular — hence his vituperative attacks on Labor leader Kevin Rudd’s pledge to withdraw Australian troops.
A January Newspoll found that the Coalition parties are trailing 10 percentage points behind Labor; that 62% of Australian voters are opposed to the continued presence of Australian troops in Iraq; and that the Iraq war would be an important factor in determining how they vote in the upcoming federal election.
On December 13, Rudd announced that if Labor won government it would “signal to the Americans immediately that our combat troops will be withdrawn and we then enter detailed discussions with the Americans about how that is logistically done during the life that rotation and a military rotation usually lasts six months”. Australia has about 1450 troops in and around Iraq.
With his February 11 attack on Barack Obama because of the US senator’s highly qualified plan for a phased withdrawal of US combat troops — accusing Obama of being al Qaeda’s candidate in next year’s presidential election — Howard sought to shift the framework of the debate in Australia away from the issue of the tiny contingent of Australian troops toward the consequences of a “premature” withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
In pursuit of the gambit, in the following days Howard demanded that Rudd state his view of Obama’s troop withdrawal plan. Howard told federal parliament on February 13 that Rudd “doesn’t have the guts to express his view”.
The next day Rudd told ABC radio’s AM program that the “alternative strategy” to “a staged withdrawal of US troops into the year 2008” was “a continuation of the current military strategy, which, after four years, has failed”.
After noting that a staged withdrawal of US troops was one of the key recommendations for “winning” the war in the report released last December by the Iraq Study Group headed by former US secretary of state James Baker, Rudd said: “The question, which arises from that is, how do you best ensure that Iraq does not turn into a strategic defeat for the United States?”
The debate has revealed that beyond the differences between Howard and Rudd over Australian troops they share the same strategic goal — the triumph of the US war and the installation of a stable, pro-US regime in Iraq that will open up the country’s vast oil resources to exploitation by Western corporations.
Howard wants to keep Australian troops in Iraq as a symbolic indicator of his government’s political support for the Bush strategy, while Rudd wants to withdraw them to pressure Washington to adopt what he thinks will be a “better” war-fighting strategy — a “winning” strategy. In fact, Rudd wants the Australian troops to relocate to neighbouring countries to continue to train Iraqi security forces.
In a February 15 interview on radio station Triple M, Rudd explained that “on the overall question of Iraq, the question which Mr Howard still can’t answer is, what’s his strategy for winning this war which has rolled on for four years and which has resulted in 60,000 [sic] Iraqi deaths and us being no closer to an exit strategy than we were on day one?”
Although the withdrawal of Australian troops would be wholeheartedly welcomed by the anti-war movement regardless of Rudd’s motivations, underlying his arguments on Iraq is an acceptance of the legitimacy of the occupation of Iraq.
Moreover, while Rudd has challenged Howard’s position on Iraq, he remains firmly committed to the Australia-US alliance — the alliance that is at the heart of Australian participation in Bush’s fraudulent “war on terror”, of which the Iraq invasion and occupation is part.
Rudd told Radio 4BC presenter Greg Cary on February 15 that “Australia and the United States have enjoyed an alliance for more than 60 years and it’s an alliance of which I am proud”. In his Triple M interview, after explaining that he would “start talks with the Americans” after he was elected and “have [Australian troops] out within a rotation or two”, Rudd said he doesn’t “think you should leave your ally immediately in the lurch”.
