Tuesday 13 February 2007

#3: On Howard & Obama

John Howard taking a slash at Barak Obama (and the US Democrats in general) about his plan to disengage US combat troops from Iraq has had Australian commentators a touch nonplussed.

Taking my cue from The Australian newspaper today (13 February 2007, it may well have been a brilliant piece of political playmaking. It diverted attention from issues of climate change and refocussed it on national security, Howard's preferred ground. That's according to Dennis Shannahan.

Greg Sheridan seemed absolutely bursting to be positive about Howard's admonition but he just couldn't bring himself to do it:
The substance of what Howard said was right....Nonetheless, Howard clearly crossed the acceptable rhetoric to say that al-Qa'ida would pray every day for an Obama victory.

Sheridan also thought that portraying Howard's statement as political playmaking was "too Machiavellian": Howard merely showed a "rare lapse of discipline". Howard would never play crass political games with matters of national interest. Would he?

Oh, yes he would and, oh yes he did, is the way I read Steve Lewis. This was a "calculated risk... with carefully chosen remarks." And, according to Lewis, Howard fundamentally mishandled it.

Geoff Elliott, reporting from Washington, agreed with Lewis: "it was a deep miscalculation on a number of levels." The Elliott article is a pithy insight into the adroitness of Obama's politics.

Obama has more or less pinched the "exit strategy" set out by the Iraq Study Group (comprising luminaries of the Washington foreign policy establishment - go here for background) and now pretty well owns it with the bill he's introduced into the US Senate. It's great politics because:
1. it resonates with the American public - it's called "democracy" ("get us out of here")
2. it's credible policy.

Obama must have loved Howard's gratuitous intervention, to the extent that it allowed him to play it out a bit more to the audience that coumts - the voting US public. And his comeback is virtually unanswerable: if the Australian Prime Minister is so "ginned up" about Iraq, then he/we should commit 20,000 more Australian troops to bolster the 1400 troops we already have there (actually, on a per capita basis, that would be an extra 8,000 troops to achieve "equal effort" but the point is made).

Obama's risoste was picked up in a letter to the editor from Sean K. Davis of Alabama USA:
I am apalled and disgusted with John Howard's comment....It's easy to posture with such bravado when it's not your young men and women being maimed and slaughtered. It's easy to say 'carry on' when it's not your national treasure being sucked into a political and military balck hole.

Quite so.

Howard's calculated risk here is that, this time round, Obama is highly unlikely to be the Democrat nominee, let alone President. Hillary doesn't thrill me but she's cashed up with a formidable political machine behind her. And, from left field, what are the prospects of the incipient "draft Gore" campaign? Whatever, but from this distance, it would seem that there's a pretty good chance that, come January 2009, there will be a Democrat occupying the White House. In this context, having a slash at all Democrats seems most unstatesmanlike, pretty dopey in fact.

Howard is a master of diversionary tactics - bagging public education is tried and true - but this time,on this issue, I can't see it being particularly productive, for a few reasons:

1. Obama's not going away any time soon and he will continue to articulate his policy position through a particularly long lead in to the US primaries
2. In the absence of an unlikely turn of events, debate on the direction of the Iraq war isn't going to quieten down. Quite the contarry, given rising disquiet, here and in the US (and the UK, of course)
3. Other tricky issues - climate change, education, health, for example - aren't going to drop off the radar screen.

I reckon Howard's stuffed up this time.


A postscript

Check out Obama's speech in 2002 opposing the Iraq adventure. Here's an excerpt:

But I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.


Seems right on the money, more than 4 years on. You can find the full text - it's not very long - here.

Update 15 February
Mike Steketee has a pretty good line on the politics - "the whole context has shifted to when and how to withdraw" while Greg Sheridan has abandoned his caution and declared it that this "has been a good week for John Howard and a very troubling week for Kevin Rudd".

As at the time of writing, the Iraq War had been in progress for nearly 4 years - 1427 days. Check here for the current length of the war. The First World War went for 1563 days. The Iraq War passes this milestone (sic) on 1 July 2007.




Post Script 23 February - Blindsided

Tony Blair's announcement this week of a scaling down of the UK military commitment in Iraq demonstrates how just how comprehensively Howard (together with Foreign Minister Downer and Defence Minister Nelson) did stuff up.

Howard has been left looking discredited and dopey - and his assertion that he has been aware for some time of British intentions beggars belief.

It's a little bit reminiscent of Billy McMahon's furious denunciation of Gough Whitlam visiting China in 1971 (?), only to have Richard Nixon do likewise a little later.

However, John Howard is no Billy McMahon to Kevin Rudd's Gough Whitlam.

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