During a September visit to Australia, President Bush did his level best to rally support for Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative ideological ally. Conceding that the Australian electorate seems anxious to change directions, Bush added, “I wouldn’t count the man out. As I recall, he’s kind of like me. We both have run from behind and won.”
Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq.
Labor Party head Kevin Rudd’s pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush’s staunchest allies.
Rudd has named global warming as his top priority, and his signing of the Kyoto Protocol will leave the U.S. as the only industrialized country not to have joined it.
Rudd said he would withdraw Australia’s 550 combat troops from Iraq, leaving twice that number in mostly security roles. Howard had said all the troops will stay as long as needed.
How bad was it for the conservatives in Australia? The votes are still being tallied, but it appears that Howard will be only the second sitting prime minister in 106 years of Australia’s federal government to lose his own seat in Parliament.
As for U.S. politics, Atrios adds a worthwhile point: “[I]t’s almost always a mistake to perceive the domestic politics of another country as having all that much to do with US politics, but it’s also the case that Howard was a tremendous asshole and it’s lovely to see him being defeated.”
Quite right.
Glenn Greenwald expounded on this nicely.
There’s a tendency in the U.S. to view the elections in other countries based on the self-centered perspective that the result is always some sort of referendum on the U.S. Hence, all sorts of unwarranted conclusions are typically drawn whenever a pro-Bush foreign leader is defeated or re-elected.
Like most foreign elections, the humiliating defeat of Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, was driven largely by their own domestic concerns, and it had little (though not nothing) to do with the U.S. Still, it is worth celebrating Howard’s defeat in light of how pernicious a presence he was, as one of the very few remaining world leaders who loyally supported the worst and most war-loving aspects of the Bush/Cheney foreign policy.
Glenn also reminded me that just as Bush interjected himself into Australian politics in September, backing Howard and rallying conservatives to his campaign, Howard did the same with U.S. politics, saying back in February, “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.”
These are the words of a shameless, ridiculous hack. He won’t be missed on the global stage.