In Australia: Voters abandon PM over Iraq war

John Kerin
December 31, 2005

VOTER support for John Howard's decision to go to war in Iraq is in freefall, with even Coalition supporters who backed the 2003 invasion now questioning the value of the protracted conflict.

Fewer than half of Coalition supporters now believe the Iraq war was worth it, according to a Newspoll conducted exclusively for The Weekend Australian.

In total, two-thirds of Australians, about 66 per cent, now believe it was not worth going to war, up from 58 per cent a year ago. Just 27 per cent believe it was worth it, compared with 32per cent a year ago.

Among Coalition voters, only 43 per cent believe it was worth going to war, a sharp drop from 50 per cent last December and 63 per cent early last year.

Despite the figures, however, insurgent violence, kidnappings and a dispute over power-sharing in the wake of the December 15 Iraqi elections continue to jeopardise any plans by the Prime Minister to withdraw troops from the troubled country.

Mr Howard has repeatedly said Australia will not "cut and run" from Iraq, prompting defence strategists to claim that the results would not have any political significance.

Australia has 1320 troops in the Iraq theatre, including 450 troops protecting Japanese engineers and training Iraqi forces in al-Muthanna, in the south.

The al-Muthanna taskforce was due home in May 2006, but its stay is likely to be extended. And Mr Howard could come under further pressure from Washington to supply more troops in the coming year if the US needs to support greater Iraqi reconstruction efforts.

US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have also suffered with voters over the prolonged Iraqi conflict.

Despite winning elections since the March 2003 invasion, recent poll results have shown both leaders under pressure on the Iraq issue.

Mr Bush's admission last week that his administration had made mistakes in Iraq led to a 10-point jump in the number of Americans who believe he is handling the situation well, from 36 per cent to 46 per cent.

The Newspoll figures represent another blow for the Howard Government, which has been suffering in recent polls as voters absorb the legislative blitz of the past two months, which included the controversial changes to industrial relations laws.

A Newspoll published on Tuesday revealed that Mr Howard and his Government had lost support in every state and every demographic, including elderly voters, in the past three months.

Coalition support is now well below the level of the 2004 election, with Labor on 52 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote and the Government on 48per cent. Mr Howard's personal rating has also fallen.

Opposition defence spokesman Robert McClelland said last night the Iraq poll proved that Mr Howard's own supporters were passing judgment on the protracted Iraqi war.

"First, people were told the war was about removing Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and that was based on faulty intelligence," he said.

"Then they were told it was about removing Saddam Hussein and creating a Western-style democracy. But there was no plan to fill the post-Saddam vacuum and no understanding of Middle East personality and culture or decades of, at times, brutal factionalism."

But a spokesman for Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said talk of "abandoning Iraqis at a time when they were courageously trying to embrace democracy" was outrageous.

"You would think all political parties would support the Iraqis rather than abandon them to the terrorists," he said.

He said that on a recent visit to Iraq, Mr Downer had been struck by the level of optimism in the country and said Australia would not "abandon its support for the process".

Australia Defence Association executive director Neil James said the poll result was predictable, but governments could not "develop strategy and fight wars on the basis of opinion polls".

"You have to take a longer-term view ... it would have been great, wouldn't it, in 1940 if the Brits had decided to give up on World War II or the Americans did the same after Pearl Harbor," he said.

Fellow defence strategist Alan Behm said he believed the poll result had "little political significance" for Mr Howard but it did "signify a weariness with the whole episode among voters".

"I think we are just following the pattern of the US and the UK where war-weariness and a lack of palpable results has taken its toll," he said. "Of course the difference here is that John Howard and Australia have been able to avoid casualties."

Meanwhile in Iraq, armed gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shia family near Latifiyah, a Sunni-dominated town about 35km south of Baghdad, in the latest wave of violence.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed a police officer, gunmen assassinated an Iraqi driver working with a French company, and a university student was killed in a drive-by shooting.

The political turmoil surrounding parliamentary elections since December 15 has dampened the Bush administration's hopes for a broad-based Government that would include minority Sunnis as well as secular Shi'ites, helping to draw disaffected Sunnis away from the insurgency.

LINK:  15 cheers for the Aussies! Keep up the good work and get rid of Howard!