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Howard calls for unity over Iraq
WASHINGTON -- Australian Prime Minister John Howard has called for a unified world approach to pressure Iraq to give up its alleged weapons of mass destruction, saying this provided the only real chance of a peaceful solution to the issue. Speaking after talks in Washington with U.S. President George W. Bush and senior White House officials, Howard said the U.S. objectives in disarming Iraq were "proper goals" which "the entire world should pursue". Howard -- a steadfast supporter of the U.S. position -- urged the United Nations and the Arab world to tell Baghdad loudly, "Mate, the game is up." "We believe a world in which weapons of mass destruction are in the hands of rogue states with the potential threat of them falling into the hands of terrorists, is not a world that Australia, if we can possibly avoid it, wants to be part of," he said. Despite considerable public disquiet, Australia has already deployed around 2,000 troops as well as aircraft, ships and ground equipment to the Persian Gulf as part of a U.S.-led military build-up called Operation Bastille. Howard refused to say whether his government would approve joining any invasion of Iraq without a new U.N. resolution warning Iraq to disarm. "I'm not going to hypothesize about that judgment at this stage," he said, but he did indicate that any such decision would be first put to his cabinet. "It's a pre-deployment. It's been made quite clear this morning and it's been understood by the (Bush) administration that if ... a request comes to Australia, then that request has to be responded to by a meeting of the Australian cabinet," he said. "That's been our position all along," he said, adding that "Australia does not believe that all of the heavy lifting on something like this should be done by the United States and the United Kingdom alone." Asked if he worried that joining any invasion against Iraq would open his country to attack by terrorists, Howard said nobody was immune from terrorism in the modern world. Howard also stressed his preference for a second, stronger U.N. resolution on Iraq ahead of any possible military action. "The value of another (U.N.) resolution -- and the stronger the better -- will be the additional diplomatic heat that it puts on Iraq," he said. "I think you will get something out of the United Nations. You may not get what I would call a black or white resolution. You could get a gray resolution and if you get a gray resolution you've then got to make a judgment as to what you do," Howard said. "If there is a faint hope of this thing being solved without military force, that faint hope is for the whole world saying the same thing and saying it very loudly to Iraq -- and most particularly the Arab states saying, 'mate, the game is up,"' Howard said. Reuters contributed to this report.
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