The Australian: ALP soft on tyranny: Downer [May 18, 2005]
Dennis Shanahan, Political editor . . .
FOREIGN Minister Alexander Downer has accused Labor leaders from John Curtin and Gough Whitlam to Mark Latham of appeasement of Nazi Germany, communist Russia and Saddam Hussein, and provided a philosophical justification for invading Iraq and helping to free East Timor. . . .
The Foreign Minister accused current Labor leader Kim Beazley of adopting "a little Australia" policy consistent with a "pattern of weak Labor leadership nationally, particularly on the issues of appeasement, isolationism and shirking international treaty obligations". . .
"In Timor, in the wars of liberation in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the overall war on terror, the Coalition has been sustained by the conviction that Australia is a significant country with international military and peacekeeping obligations," Mr Downer said ...
Mr Downer's comments echo the post-election speeches of US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who have both stressed the importance of spreading democracy in the Middle East....
"In 2003, Labor went to water on Saddam Hussein and his regime, declaring Iraq an irrelevance in the war on terror. There was no shortage of so-called realists prepared to tell us that democracy was unsuitable for export, and even that the Islamic world would never accept what they airily characterised as cultural imperialism by force of arms," he said...
Mr Downer said it was too early to "reach triumphalist conclusions" but the idea that democracy could be used to find a way out of the "impasses of the Middle East can no longer be dismissed as naive".
"The much closer ties we now enjoy with Indonesia, relations with Afghanistan and Iraq, the momentum for change in Palestinian-Israeli relations - they are all encouraging signs for the future and for the prosecution of the war on terror."
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