CANBERRA - Prime Minister John Howard says one reason he won't withdraw Australian troops from Iraq is because it would humiliate the United States.
Two Australian soldiers were injured in southern Iraq yesterday when a roadside bomb exploded as their light armoured vehicle passed by.
Mr Howard did
not comment on the incident today.
But he said America's power and support was important for Australian security and he would not support a policy that weakened it.
It would be a "colossal blow to American prestige in the Middle East and around the world" if the coalition pulled out of Iraq and appeared to have lost the war, he said.
"There is nothing in it for Australia in seeing America humiliated in the Middle East," he told ABC Radio.
"And that's the effect of calling for Australian withdrawal, because if it's OK for us to go why isn't it OK for the Americans and the British to go?"
Mr Howard said history made it clear that American power and support was very important to Australia's security.
"I'm simply not going to support a policy that leads the humiliation, the withdrawal and the weakening of American power and prestige around the world," he said.
"That would give great power to terrorists."
Mr Howard said he would have preferred that Australia was no longer engaged in an operation training Iraqi forces.
"I would have liked a situation where the whole thing had moved faster, but that hasn't been the case," he said.
Mr Howard said the deaths and displacements of civilians in Iraq were justified by the removal of former dictator Saddam Hussein.
The coalition invaded Iraq because of a belief, shared by both sides of politics, that it possessed weapons of mass destruction, Mr Howard said.
"That was the reason but the consequence was (the removal of) Saddam, who had been responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of people and was a brutal dictator," he said.
"People, their bodies didn't end up in the morgue in those days, they ended up in mass graves.
"So if you are talking about morality, the removal of Saddam Hussein can be very strongly defended on moral grounds."
- AAP
