John Howard probably committed Australia to a coalition of the willing two or three months before the Opposition suspects he did, but his enthusiasm for a conflict has been declining from the time that the Opposition brought United Nations assent into the equation.
Since then the Prime Minister has been backtracking, trying desperately to narrow and redefine the commitment he made, insisting that he had always reserved the right to drop out at the last moment, ruling out participation in anything but a short war and rejecting any notion either of participation in an Iraqi peacekeeping force or an army of occupation.
First off he was snookered by Kevin Rudd, who succeeded in persuading local public opinion that assent to any intervention should be contingent on a United Nations resolution. Then a piece of mischief by Laurie Brereton, that was focused on undermining Simon Crean and Kevin Rudd, finally embarrassed Labor into outright opposition to a mere American intervention. But it’s not Labor that’s the problem—Labor is only marginally less keen on participation than Howard is. It has been the failure of the United Nations to play to script that means Howard now has more to fear from the coalition of the
unwilling at home than from the coalition of the willing abroad.
He’s not the only one who miscalculated. One of the reasons for Labor’s dithering (until Brereton’s intervention) was the belief that the UN Security Council would ultimately cave in to American pressure. Labor never wanted to rule out the idea of joining an expeditionary force, even one going without United Nations sanction—provided the UN had been seen to fail.
What no-one seems to have anticipated is that France and Germany, with help from Russia and China, would devise a UN Iraq strategy appealing both to the realists and the moralists. The European line has been to push for time, and for threats falling short of war. However much John Howard has pooh-poohed European and Asian comments on the continuing scope for diplomacy, the prospect of further concessions and the uncertain state of knowledge about Saddam Hussein’s weapons, he has been forced into the position of seeming an enthusiast for war. Or at least an enthusiast for whatever the US position happens to be at the time.
Now he’s in a host of binds. The charge of being an American poodle hurts—the more so when the master does not seem to appreciate how