Australian prime minister makes powerful case for standing with US against Iraq

In an address yesterday to the National Press Club in Canberra, Australian Prime Minister John Howard laid out the case for disarming Iraq despite opposition from some Western nations.

Australia has been a staunch ally of the United States, fighting side by side with the U.S. in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the first Gulf War, and Howard argued that Australians should always remember that no nation is more important to our long-term security than that of the United States.

Howard focused his remarks on the threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction claiming that if the world fails to deal once and for all with the problem of Iraq and its possession of weapons of mass destruction it will have given a green light to the further proliferation of these weapons because other rogue state will have seen a world effectively stand by and allow it to happen.

The Prime Minister also took issue with those who would delay action or propose increasing inspectors saying that its a question not of time or inspectors but its a question of [Iraq’s] attitude. Echoing President Bushs at his own press conference last week, Howard argued that the cost of doing nothing is potentially much greater than the cost of doing something. Because if Iraq is not effectively disarmed not only could she use chemical and biological weapons against her own people again, other rogue states would be encouraged to copy her, the spread of those weapons would multiply the likelihood that terrorists would lay their hands on them.

He went on to detail the danger posed by the confluence of weapons of mass destruction and radical Islamist terror, and how the West should respond: Those who assert that through some calibration of our foreign policy we can buy immunity from terrorist attacks advance a proposition which is both morally flawed and factually wrong. It is morally flawed because this nation should never fashion its foreign policy under threat andis also factually flawed because the victims of terrorists over the past decade have come from many nations sharing a full variety of foreign policy and strategic views.