Iraq must be seen in context:Ex-Australian PM

John Howard, Australia's former prime minister, stared history in the eye seven years ago, when he pulled back the curtains of his Washington hotel room and saw smoke billowing from the Pentagon, where terrorist hijackers had crashed a fully loaded Boeing 757 into the building's outer ring.

In an instant, he was plunged into an emotional hurricane.

"The shock, the disbelief and the realization came slowly at first, but, then with a rush, that this was an event that was going to change the way we lived," he said later.

A day earlier, Mr. Howard had met George W. Bush, then-U. S. president, for the first time, lunched at the White House and spent the afternoon in the Pentagon.

In the end, 9/11 forged a powerful new relationship between the two men as Australia's second-longest-serving prime minister became an unwavering supporter of one of the most unpopular presidents in U. S. history.

Mr. Howard, who was in Toronto on Wednesday for the Fraser Institute's Dialogue speaker series, said he believes Mr. Bush has been "underestimated."

Sipping milky tea, dressed in a banker's blue pinstriped suit, the instinctively conservative Australian politician has a special new interest in history.

At 69, the four-term PM has begun writing his memoirs.

You can't assess the work of a president or prime minister without first having a sense of proportion, he argues. Leaders must be judged on how they handled the dominant challenges of their time in power.

"Winston Churchill was measured by how he led Britain in the Second World War, not by his policies on local government or education," he says.

"Many critics, in America and elsewhere, have ignored the singular achievement of [Mr. Bush's] presidency. He successfully dealt with the biggest challenge of his eight years in office. Against all expectations there were no further terrorist attacks on the United States."

"Bush's challenge in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks was greater than that faced by any president since [Franklin] Roosevelt at the time of Pearl Harbor," Mr. Howard emphasizes.

"People forget just how apprehensive the world was. I was there and I understood how the Americans felt. I understood the sense of bewildered outrage that their country should be attacked.

"What happened in Iraq has to be seen in context."

Over the years, as he fought battles at home, imposing gun control, introducing a goods and services tax, slashing government spending and eliminating $96-billion in national debt, Mr. Howard marched in step with Mr. Bush internationally. He supported the invasion of Afghanistan, opposed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and took Australia to war in Iraq despite huge domestic opposition.

"There were some errors made in the post-invasion

stage," he says. "That could have been handled better. But that doesn't alter the fundamental judgment of whether it was right to do it in the first place.

"I haven't altered my view on the wisdom of acting in the first place. What people forget is that that action was taken at a time when everybody believed that there was going to be another terrorist attack on the American mainland.

"Bush never believed that Saddam [Hussein] was directly linked to the attack on the World Trade Center. But what he did believe, with a lot of justification, was that Saddam could be the source of some other terrorist attack, because he had a track record of supporting terrorist activity."

In the long run, Iraq may turn out to be only the second functioning democracy in the Middle East, after Israel.

"If that is the legacy [of the war], I think it is terrific."

Mr. Howard has a reputation of being blunt to the point of being brutal, a trait he displayed two years ago, when Barack Obama, then junior U. S. Senator from Illinois, first announced he was running for president.

At the time, Mr. Obama had sponsored a bill calling for withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Iraq by March, 2008.

Mr. Howard responded by declaring, "If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March, 2008, and pray as many times as possible for a victory not only for Mr. Obama, but also for the Democrats."

Now, he sheepishly says, "At the time, I thought he was advocating a bad policy and I said so in a fairly colourful way, and he responded in a fairly colourful way, as you do in elections."

Mr. Obama accused Mr. Howard of uttering "empty rhetoric" and suggested if the Australian Prime Minister was "ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq," he needed to send another 20,000 Australians.

Now, Mr. Howard says, a little more diplomatically, he doesn't think U. S. foreign policy will change all that much under the new President.

"I would predict that in a couple of years' time, not now,

... when people have had an opportunity to observe what he has done in terms of American foreign policy, it will not be all that different than what Bush might have done," he says.

"When you actually analyze the detail of what Bush did and compare it with what [president Bill] Clinton did, there weren't that many differences -- even in relation to Iraq.

"People have forgotten that Clinton and the American Congress passed an act declaring regime change in Iraq a national political objective for the United States. I think Obama is probably, for want of a better expression, slightly more left wing or internationalist than Clinton was. There will be differences but in a couple of years, people will be surprised at how things remain the same."

A politician who presided over a prolonged period of prosperity, Mr. Howard now worries his legacy could disappear under a new wave of public debt.

Once described by Forbes magazine as "the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of Down Under," he slashed public spending, paid off public debt, put his faith in free markets and watched as Australia's economy grew by 5.5% a year.

During his 11 years in power (1996-2007), two million jobs were created in Australia; real incomes increased 21%; and real wealth per person doubled. Now, he predicts attempts to stimulate the economy out of recession may undo everything.

"We took years and years and years to pay off a whole lot of debt," he says. "We had US$96-billion of debt, which for an economy of Australia's size was enormous. But we created a situation where we had no big debt."

This week, Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, unveiled a US$42-billion Nation Building & Jobs Plan that combines increased infrastructure spending with cash rebates and business tax cuts.

"Once you open the floodgates on spending, everybody comes in," Mr. Howard warns.

"The great danger is the stimulation of the economy through a great deal of expenditure will be used as a cover, as an excuse for people to spend money in areas where they always wanted to spend money. It should be against every instinct of your upbringing to spend money unnecessarily," he adds, sipping his tea in his banker's suit.

pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com

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