Latham lets fly on Howard, Bush and threat to Australia

Mark Latham

CANBERRA - Australia's key alliance with the United States would have been seriously damaged had Labor won the last election, the political diaries of former leader Mark Latham reveal.

In the diaries, published yesterday, Latham expresses admiration for New Zealand's policy on Iraq and calls President George W. Bush an imbecile who is dragging Australia into another Vietnam.

He is scathing of the alliance policies of Prime Minister John Howard and describes Labor leader Kim Beazley, who was defence spokesman during the Latham era, as a man of war with a siege mentality.

Despite as leader repeating the official Labor line that the US alliance was a partnership between equals, Latham saw it as "a funnel for unnecessary wars".

Key sections of his views on Bush, the alliance and Iraq were written when polls placed Latham as the man likely to be Australia's next leader.

Latham says his priority in national security is standing up for Australia, putting the safety of its people first - "unlike Howard's adventurism overseas". He cites polls showing that 65 per cent of Australians believed that the nation's involvement in Iraq was more likely to make it a terrorist target. "Thirty per cent of the country will back Howard and US imperialism. The rest, the true patriots, will want to look after our people and let the Americans solve the problem they created. No more arselicking ... An independent foreign policy."

In his diaries and in an interview yesterday with ABC radio, Latham praises New Zealand's decision to stay out of Iraq, saying it had become the safest country on Earth.

"There is no terrorist threat to New Zealand that has been identified but there is one here," he told the ABC. "If you go supporting bad American policy you make yourself a bigger target and you stir dissent in your own country."

Latham says in his diaries that Labor should be the anti-war party of Australian politics: "Other than World War II, every war this country has fought was disconnected from our national interests ... The US alliance is a funnel that draws us into unnecessary wars; first Vietnam, and then Iraq. With Bush and Howard there will be more to come."

Latham writes that because of the electronic spy base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, the US needs Australia more than the reverse, and that the Americans restricted Australia's capacity to trade and integrate with China.

He warns that Washington's problems with China will one day become Australia's, and is scathing of Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric.

Latham describes Bush as an "imbecile", a "dunderhead" and a "bonehead", and said he wore the President's criticism of his pre-election policy to bring Australian troops home from Iraq as a badge of honour.

But he reserves his greatest venom for Howard, and has no regrets for the row that erupted after calling the Prime Minister an arselicker in 2002, well before he became leader. "If anything, I was restrained - Howard has got his tongue so far up Bush's clacker that often the poor guy must think he's got an extra haemorrhoid."