Australian PM John Howard said (basically) that Al Qaida would want Barak Obama to win.
Australia's conservative prime minister slammed Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) on Sunday over his opposition to the Iraq war, a day after the first-term U.S. senator announced his intention to run for the White House in 2008.
Obama said Saturday at his campaign kickoff in Springfield, Ill., that one of the country's first priorities should be ending the war in Iraq. He has also introduced a bill in the Senate to prevent President Bush from increasing American troop levels in Iraq and to remove U.S. combat forces from the country by March 31, 2008.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch Bush ally who has sent troops to Iraq and faces his own re-election bid later this year, said Obama's proposals would spell disaster for the Middle East.
"I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Howard said on Nine Network television.
"If I were running al-Qaida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."
Captain Ed points out how unhelpful it is when our allies butt into our electoral processes this way.
Howard certainly had a point regarding Obama's policy stands on Iraq and the war on terror. Had he limited his criticisms to just the policies, Howard would have made a great argument for tenacity and will. However, he stepped over a line when he claimed that al-Qaeda should pray for an Obama victory.
We have a long tradition of demanding outside governments stay out of our elections, even rhetorically, and that they should allow the American electorate to make our own decisions about leadership. Granted, we have not always been good neighbors about doing that ourselves, and Australian elections in particular came in for some heavy-handed CIA interference in the 1970s. (It was this interference that initially created the impulse of Christopher Boyce to start selling secrets from TRW to the Soviets when he inadvertently stumbled onto coded intercepts from CIA stations overseas.) This kind of rhetoric, though, would be beyond the pale for mainstream domestic politics, let alone from the leader of another nation.
I agree.
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