John Howard and Barack Obama
I couldn't say I was much of a supporter of Barack Obama's campaign for the White House, but I was impressed by his reply to John Howard's ridiculous comments. If you missed those, they went like this:
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 Obama, but also for the Democrats
This seems to me not only desperately unoriginal - I imagine every single planned withdrawal of troops from anywhere has seen someone declare it was a victory for someone or other - but also a rather careless intervention in US politcs by a foreign government. Howard has essentially stated that he cannot work with a Democratic president.
In any case Obama's reply was spot on, noting that the US had in Iraq 140,000 (I think 133,000 now) troops to Australia's 1,400 (actually that's their total in the 'theatre', it's about 850 in Iraq itself). I can never understand why, if this battle is as important as people like Howard say it is, they don't have ten times as many troops there as they do. Australia should have around 9,000 troops if it was to have the same troops to population as the US, ie 10 times as many, and 2,400 if it was the same as the UK.
But why should they not have more troops than the US or UK if Howard believes it to be so important? Australia fielded four divisions overseas in World War II, when the population was less than half what it is today. Howard is comforting Osama as he attacks Obama.
Labels: defence
posted by Matthew @ 2/12/2007 04:36:00 PM
Comments: 0
