A fine gust of progressive wind from Down Under

We’re coming to our senses — and Australia is showing us how it’s done! [G’day Greg!] Congrats and relieved hugs to our friends from Down Under who “changed the course” in a way they haven’t done since 1929, and who have given us both a bit of wind beneath our wings and a big shot of hope!

Howard is gone, much as Blair is gone … and Bush will soon follow — we’re turning our attention toward cleaning up the mess, doing a U Turn back toward a cooperative agenda, if not entirely progressive as yet.

The “coalition of the willing,” short on gravitas to start with, has virtually disappeared leaving the US as an isolated force; the Aussies will vamoose, and the Poles will follow — meanwhile, the price that soldiers have paid for Bush’s Folly … forced into desertion and suicide, with some twenty thousand additional brain injuries gone unrecorded, and sometimes unnoticed … has decimated the morale of the military and the confidence of the nation.

There are all kinds of news bits out there we could talk about today, including Obama’s lead over Hil and the Pentagon’s push to put [Bush spokesman] Petraeus back into perspective but this lovely upset in Australia seems big enough to shake the planet a bit and perk up our Monday! Be sure to read the last op/ed … puts old Howard in his [historical] place.

Jude

Australia’s Path Bends Away From U.S.
RAYMOND BONNER, NYT
November 26, 2007

LONDON, Nov. 25 — The defeat of John Howard, Australia’s prime minister, in Saturday’s election deprived President Bush of one of his most steadfast allies and will bring changes in Australia’s foreign policy that will be felt in Washington.

During recent years, Mr. Howard was unabashedly in the American corner at times when other world leaders were keeping their studied distance, and his loss is likely to be particularly acute for Mr. Bush, who puts great stock in personal relations in the conduct of foreign relations.

Mr. Howard, leader of the center-right Liberal Party, was one of the most frequent foreign visitors to the Bush White House and Texas ranch (ranking behind Tony Blair of Britain and King Abdullah II of Jordan, and tied with Ariel Sharon of Israel), according to the State Department.

Australia’s next prime minister, Kevin Rudd, said Sunday, in his first news conference since the election, that he had received a congratulatory call from President Bush, and that he would be visiting the United States early in the new year.

Under Mr. Rudd, the most notable foreign policy changes will be on the environment, nuclear issues and Iraq, said a veteran Australian diplomat, who requested anonymity because he feared that Mr. Rudd would not look kindly on a public servant speaking out on foreign policy.

Mr. Rudd stated unequivocally in his victory speech on Saturday evening that Australia would ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. That will further isolate the United States, leaving it as the only industrialized country not to have done so.

Mr. Rudd has said that his Labor Party would withdraw Australia’s 550 combat troops from Iraq. That would still leave more than 300 Australian support troops in Iraq, so the move may be seen as largely symbolic.

For the Bush administration, symbolism and gestures count in a war without much international support, and the biggest difference on Iraq may come over the new government’s public posture.

In the face of the largest antiwar demonstrations since Vietnam, Mr. Howard sent Australian troops into Iraq. In fact, Australia’s tough and highly trained special forces were secretly operating in western Iraq in advance of the American invasion. Mr. Howard could at times sound more hawkish than Mr. Bush on the need to stay the course when the war was going badly.

Mr. Rudd, by contrast, is unlikely to offer public support for the war effort, and if he does speak on the subject, he may well be critical, the veteran diplomat said.

Washington can still continue to count on Australian support in Afghanistan, Australian officials and political analysts said. Australia has about 1,000 troops there, including special forces.

Washington will undoubtedly be watching Australia’s relations with China under Mr. Rudd, who was once a diplomat in Beijing and speaks fluent Mandarin. When President Hu Jintao of China was in Australia in September, Mr. Rudd spoke to him in Chinese.

But with China a huge buyer of Australian resources, Australia had already been moving closer to Beijing. Under Mr. Howard, President Hu was the first nondemocratic leader to address the Australian Parliament.

A looming source of friction between the United States and Australia is over Australia’s uranium policy; Australia has some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. The Bush administration has been pushing Congress to allow the transfer of nuclear technology and fuel to India, which was halted during the Clinton administration. Mr. Howard’s government said it would sell uranium to India.

But the Labor Party, which was a leader in the world antinuclear movement in the 1970s, opposed the sale, and has said it will not sell uranium to any country that has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which India has not.

Another potential fissure is over America’s military presence in Australia. An expansion of America’s forward basing abilities, which was part of the agenda of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, has gone on almost unnoticed in Australia’s vast Northern Territory. This is not likely to sit well with Labor’s left-wing base.

Mr. Howard was often lampooned by his critics as being Bush’s poodle, a word which some also used to describe Mr. Blair. But a look at the record suggests that Australia did well out of the relationship.

Tariffs were lifted on Australian steel, a free-trade agreement was signed, and Australia alone enjoys visa requirements for professionals that allow some 10,500 a year to enter the United States.

The Howard government also gained greater access to military technology and intelligence, said Michael Thawley, the Australian ambassador to Washington from 2001 to 2005. He declined to provide details.

When Mr. Howard began to face domestic political pressure at home over the detention of two Australian citizens, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he appealed directly to Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and the two were released.

Several recent polls have shown a growing antagonism in Australia toward America, with many Australians expressing a higher regard for China. But the two men whose names are being bandied about as the most likely ambassadors to Washington are Bob Carr, a long-time Labor politician who is a student of American presidents, and Kim Beazley, a former defense minister and a leader of the Labor Party who is a Civil War buff.

Australia Takes A Progressive Turn
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, and Ali Frick, The Progress Report
November 26, 2007

This weekend, Australians went to the polls and delivered an emphatic victory for Labor leader Kevin Rudd, while handing the party of conservative Bush ally John Howard its “worst election defeat in its 63-year history.” Howard “suffered the additional ignominy of losing his own constituency seat” in addition to the prime minister’s seat, the first time since 1929 that an Australian prime minister has been voted out of parliament. Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat who made combating global warming, strengthening workers’ rights, and redeploying from Iraq key priorities in his campaign, “swings Australia toward the political left after almost 12 years of conservative rule.” The incoming prime minister has wasted no time implementing his new vision for Australia. Yesterday, he convened a meeting with government officials to discuss the mechanics of signing onto the Kyoto pact on global warming, and he announced that he will attend a U.N. climate change conference in Bali next month. Rudd soon plans to begin negotiations with the Bush administration over the withdrawal of Australia’s 500 troops from Iraq. “Today Australia looks to the future,” Rudd said. “Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward.”

BUSHWHACKED: President Bush, who lauded the outgoing prime minister as a “man of steel,” lost one of his “most steadfast allies” in Howard. The Bush administration had sought to influence the Australian elections with press offensives declaring the Iraq escalation a success, hoping that the reports would bolster Howard’s campaign. For his part, Howard had interceded on Bush’s behalf prior to the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, claiming a Bush reelection was needed in order to “stay and finish the job” in Iraq. In February of this year, Howard inserted himself into U.S. domestic politics again by spouting this smear: “If I was 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 [Barack] Obama, but also for the Democrats.” In a 2003 speech delivered to the Australian parliament, Howard claimed history had proven wrong those critics of Bush who “assaulted his judgment, and called into question his ability to lead the U.S. in this very, very difficult conflict.” History will instead deliver a very different message than the one Howard predicted.

COALITION OF THE DEFEATED: Like Britain’s Tony Blair, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, and Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar before him, John Howard suffered greatly from his decision to participate in Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” His full-throated support for the Iraq war hurt him domestically. More than 60 percent of Australians want forces out of Iraq within a year, and Rudd pledged that Australian troops would leave by mid-2008 after consultations with the United States and the United Kingdom. Analysts noted that Bush “was a little more isolated in the world Sunday” after the loss of his close Australian ally.

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL LOSING STEAM: For many years, Howard was one of the world’s foremost climate deniers, tag-teaming with the Bush administration to remain the only major industrialized nations to stay out of the international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Until a few months ago when Howard moderated his climate change rhetoric for political reason, he and his ministers frequently “pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers.” When former vice president Al Gore traveled to Australia in September to deliver a speech on the climate crisis, Howard prohibited his party members from attending the event. With Australia mired in the midst of the worst drought the country has faced in a thousand years, Howard’s climate change denial put him in a political position isolated from his countrymen. The majority of Australians viewed climate change as the number one external threat to the country, and Rudd delivered what Australia wanted to hear. “I am determined to make Australia part of the global climate change solution — not just part of the global climate change problem,” Rudd said during his campaign.

New Australian PM Rudd will Withdraw Combat Troops from Iraq
Shahristani: Kurdistan Oil Deals Void
Bush scales back Expectations (again)
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Sunday, November 25, 2007

[open link to finish article]

Another one bites the dust. World politics is littered with the political corpses of rightwing leaders who bucked their own public to join in George W. Bush’s wars and misadventures. Spain, Italy, Poland, and in a way the UK are all object lessons in this regard. Now John Howard of Australia has joined their number Australia’s new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has pledged to withdraw Australia’s 550 combat troops from Iraq (Australia has about 500 more non-combat troops doing development work in Iraq, and it is not clear what will now be done with them). Rudd will also sign the Kyoto Treaty on fighting global warming. Rudd speaks Chinese and will stake out a new geopolitical position for Australia, while attempting to retain good or at least correct relations with Washington (next year this time that will likely be easier).

Rudd’s deputy prime minister is a woman (a first), and his team includes a rock star, former Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett.

Hey, I want a government in the US that looks like this– pro labor, against foreign military adventures, afraid of global warming, the leader speaks an Asia language, and a rock star is on the team.

Australia also has some troops in Afghanistan, which looks increasingly troubled. See Barnett Rubin’s important recent postings on the situation there and Manan Ahmed’s excellent entry on northern Pakistan at our Global Affairs Group Blog.

The NYT reports that the Bush administration is giving up on most of its political benchmarks for Iraq. Apparently the most they think they can now hope for is that Iraq will ask the United Nations to authorize an extension of the US mandate in Iraq, that parliament will pass a budget, and that the Iraqi parliament will pass a law allowing mid-level former Baath officials to hold government jobs if they have not been shown to have committed crimes in the Saddam period. Powerful blocs in parliament such as the Sadrists oppose the UN extension of the US mandate in Iraq, and most Shiites and Kurds also oppose changes in the de-Baathification regulations. I wonder if even these scaled-down political expectations are realistic. PM Nuri al-Maliki is a minority prime minister with very little support in his own parliament, and only his Kurdish alliance even allows him to stay in power.

Victorious Rudd to ratify Kyoto at once
Peter Smith, Financial Times UK
November 24 2007

Sydney - Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new Labor prime minister, on Sunday sought to put the country at the forefront of action on the environment by announcing plans to ratify the Kyoto protocol immediately and to attend the United Nations climate change conference in Bali next month.

Mr Rudd, whose party won a comprehensive weekend victory over the conservative coalition led by John Howard, has also pledged his government to withdraw 500 frontline troops in Iraq. He said the troops would leave by mid-2008 after consultations with the US and the UK.

His decision to go to Bali, which Mr Howard had not planned to attend, was welcomed by Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, as a “very important factor” in the next stage of the global climate talks.

The announcement is intended to draw a sharp contrast between Labor and the Liberal/National party coalition, which had only recently begun to address climate change issues seriously following a shift of opinion.

The policies on climate change and Iraq will deepen US President George W.Bush’s isolation on both issues following decisions by Poland and other allies to withdraw contingents from Iraq. The US and Australia are the only big developed countries not to have ratified Kyoto.

Labor is also committed to diluting liberalised employment legislation introduced by the coalition, which was strongly opposed by unions. However, Labor policy is unlikely to diverge sharply from the coalition on other issues. As expected, Wayne Swan, the opposition finance spokesman, was named treasurer. Julia Gillard will be deputy prime minister.

“I extend our greetings tonight to our great friend and ally the United States, to our great friends and partners across Asia and the Pacific. To our great friends and partners in Europe and beyond, we look forward to a working partnership with all those nations,” Mr Rudd said in his victory speech.

In a speech in which he acknowledged the loss of his Bennelong seat, Mr Howard accepted full responsibility for the “emphatic” defeat of his coalition.

Mr Howard’s departure has left the Liberals in disarray, a situation made worse after Peter Costello, his deputy and the former treasurer, refused to take over the leadership in spite of being endorsed hours earlier by Mr Howard and Alexander Downer, the former foreign minister.

With final votes still to be counted, Labor was on course to win more than 85 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives, recording one of the biggest swings against an Australian government since the second world war.

Mr Rudd’s success was sealed by a landslide in his home state of Queensland where Labor picked up an extra 10 seats, with at least one recording a swing of close to 15 per cent. The overall national swing to Labor was more than 6 per cent.

Mr Rudd said he would be a modernist and a consensus leader and would govern from the centre. He said his top policy priorities would be education, hospital funding, industrial relations and a high-speed national broadband roll-out.

However, Mr Rudd becomes Australia’s 26th prime minister at a sensitive time. Although the country is coming into its 17th year of expansion, the economy is suffering from inflationary pressures and interest rates are on the rise.

Another skittle of the old order falls
Leading article, The Independent, UK
25 November 2007

That is that. The end. This time, it is the end for John Howard. It is all over for another leader identified with the invasion of Iraq. Jose Maria Aznar of Spain was voted out in 2004; Silvio Berlusconi of Italy fell last year; Tony Blair was forced out by his own party earlier this year; Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland lost last month; only George Bush, the prime mover, is left, and as he sets records for unpopularity he is a much reduced figure, limping to his expiry date in 2009.

Mr Howard, the four-time winner, has finally been defeated, with the added humiliation of almost certainly losing his own seat. Australia has for the first time anywhere in the world – one of those rare facts not easily checked on Google – a prime minister called Kevin.

We do not want to ascribe too much importance to Iraq. It was not the dominant issue of the election campaign. Mr Howard has, like Mr Bush and Mr Blair, been re-elected once since the Iraq war. And in Britain and the US, the new faces do not represent an unequivocal repudiation of past policy. Gordon Brown has rebalanced our Government’s rhetoric in a welcome fashion, but he is bound by the collective decision to join the invasion. The front-runner to succeed Mr Bush, Hillary Clinton, is equally bound by her support for it at the time; the war’s most clearly defined opponent, Barack Obama, has a long way to go to win the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency.

However, Mr Howard’s defeat in Australia is undoubtedly part of the slow unwinding of the failed worldview that was the mistaken response to the horror of 9/11. As the leaders who promulgated that view leave the stage, the world has the chance to rebalance both the rhetoric and the rules.

We should make it clear that this newspaper, despite its opposition to the Iraq invasion, does not repudiate the idea of liberal interventionism altogether. We do not argue that nations should never interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. Nor must every intervention have the explicit approval of the Security Council.

We hold to the position of the late Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary in Mr Blair’s first term. He oversaw the use of military force against Serbia over Kosovo. UN authorisation was never sought, because it was known that Russia and China would use their vetoes. But the action did have the united support of the 19 member states of Nato, and the legal basis in preventing crimes against humanity.

The Independent on Sunday supported intervention in Afghanistan. One reason for our campaign to renew the military covenant – joined last week by six retired top brass in the Lords – is that we believe the mission there requires a long-term and deep commitment.

We appreciate that, if the UN is not the absolute arbiter, it is harder to draw hard and fast rules. We accept that liberal interventionism becomes a matter for pragmatic judgement. But there are principles against which that judgement can be exercised.

Last week, Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s former chief of staff, set out his view: “We should have been clear we were removing Saddam because he was a ruthless dictator [but] there was no legal basis for proceeding on these grounds, and so we were not able to make this case as wholeheartedly as I would have liked.”

That would have been just as inadequate as the flawed case that Mr Blair made. But we do not think it wrong in principle. If we can prevent barbarism, we should consider it. We think Mr Blair was right to ask Charles Guthrie, the Chief of the Defence Staff, to “look at” the feasibility of military action in Zimbabwe, as we revealed this month. He was right to canvass the possibility of military action in Darfur. He was right to decide against deploying troops in both places, and he should have said the same about Iraq.

If stringent tests are met, Britain should be prepared to take part in military action around the world. The tests are similar to those set out by Mr Blair in his Chicago speech in 1999 during the Kosovo conflict: the action must avert crimes against humanity, it must command wide international support, and it must be reasonably certain of success. None was satisfied in Iraq; all were satisfied in Afghanistan.

Now those tests must be applied to new challenges – or, rather, to old challenges faced anew. In Kosovo, as Melanie McDonagh argues today, we need once again to decide the right mix of military and diplomatic response. And, as the leaders of the Middle East gather in Annapolis, Maryland, we need to decide how much other countries should contribute to peacekeeping in Palestine.

Increasingly, such decisions can be taken by leaders who no longer have to defend the bad decisions of the past. As each skittle falls, our confidence grows that a better form of liberal interventionism will prevail.

Bush’s Mean-Spirited Little Toady
Howard’s End
BRIAN McKINLAY, CounterPunch
November 26, 2007

John Howard is gone. A mean-spirited little toady and lickspittle to the Monster Bush, Howard’s end when it came was more like watching a blood sport, than an election result.

Picture the scene.

In Australia’s capital, Canberra, a huge crowd had gathered on Saturday night in the National Tally Room to see the posting on an electronic scoreboard of the results for the all important 150 House of Representative seats.

When the votes began to flood in after 7.00 pm on Saturday it was soon apparent that not only was there a gathering swing across Australia against Howard conservative coalition, but in Howard’s own Sydney seat of Bennelong, he was in desperate trouble.

His Labor opponent, a charismatic journalist, Maxine McHugh, urged the voters to reject Howard’s reactionary policies, and to make that emphatic by throwing him out of the seat he had held since 1974.

As Howard, in the Sydney residence of the Prime Minister.watched his Ministers and others being swept away, he himself was gathered up in the flood and swept away too.

Not since 1929 had an Australia Prime Minister lost his own seat at an election.

When Maxine McHugh made an appearance on the Tally Room screens the audience erupted, many shouting “Howard Out, Howard Out”

In the Tally Room the clamour grew so marked was it that the panel of journalists broadcasting the results were silenced by the tumult!

Howard was seen to be losing his own seat, just as the results showed his colleagues being decimated, with some Ministers among the fallen.

It soon became apparent that Labor had won the 75 seats needed for a Majority in the 150-member chamber. The swing continued and Labor will have a majority of about 20 in the new House,and in the Senate with it’s allies, the Greens (who will have 5 seats in the new Senate,) it will have a majority too.

The new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is an impressive intellectual,who amongst other talents is a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese, a rare talent amongst Australian politicians, but a talent that clearly won many votes for Labor amongst the burgeoning Asian communities in Melbourne and Sydney.

Top of the list for the new Australian Government will be striking down Howard’s anti-union laws which contributed to his defeat.

Labor also had made the problems of climate change a major issue, aided by their Green party allies. Howard a long time sceptic on that issue had a deathbed conversion, but too late.

Polls showed that amongst young voters, his party secured only about 30% of the vote.

Another key issue was a promise by Labor to withdraw the Australian force from Iraq. George Bush had no more slavish adherent on the issue of the war in Iraq than Howard. His closeness to Bush had become a matter of national embarrassment, and must have helped in generating the mood which has swept him away.

Some time ago an American friend suggested that there was some sort of curse on those allied to Bush in his criminal endeavours in the Middle East, and elsehere.

We have seen Aznar in Spain, Berlusconi in Italy, Blair in the U.K, and now today John Howard. All toppled from power by angry electorates….The Curse of the House of Bush. Indeed!…..like something by Edgar Allen Poe.

In their public and private meetings Bush and Howard always engaged in a mutual love fest, pouring compliments on to each other.

Bush even once called Howard, “The Man of Steel”.

One is reminded of the final unmasking of the Wizard of Oz, in which see the Wizard as a rather sad little man, once the curtain is pulled away.

The Australian people have finally pulled away the curtain from Bush’s Deputy Sheriff. The game is over, and one of the last warriors of the Coalition of the Willing has fallen!

Brian McKinlay is a former Teacher and a Historian of the Australian Labor Movement, and has written a number of books on Australian History and Politics.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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