Threat of terror attack takes toll on Howard

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - Like a time-delayed bomb, the Iraq war is finally beginning to tick under Prime Minister John Howard as Australians reject his assurances and turn instead towards a resurgent Labor.

Howard had previously escaped much of the war backlash that has hammered United States President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But new Labor leader Mark Latham has snatched much of the initiative in domestic issues, and Howard has started to stumble badly over the justification for war.

A Newspoll in the Australian yesterday showed that two-thirds of voters reject Howard's assurances that participation in the war had not increased the risk of terrorism within Australia.

The Government has denied any link between the war and the Madrid bombings, and chastised Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty for voicing an opposite conclusion endorsed by local and US intelligence officials.

Howard's position was further eroded yesterday when Defence Minister Robert Hill said the Government was "confident that there are no weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] and there is no dictator that will use them against his own people or his neighbours".

Howard's main justification for sending Australian troops to war was the now discredited claim that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that could be turned against his neighbours and the West at short notice. Canberra has never officially conceded that the claims were wrong.

Shortly after saying there was no stockpile, Hill issued a brief statement to explain the "context" of his remarks and to warn that it would be unwise to reach final judgment while inspectors continued their work. He said his comments "related to the removal of a threat rather than a judgment on whether such weapons might still be found".

But public concern is rising over what Government and intelligence officials have said is the inevitability of a terror attack in Australia and continuing revelations of links between al Qaeda and cells in Sydney.

Australia still has troops in Iraq and Hill yesterday declined to comment on when they may be brought home, other than to say Canberra would consider any invitation from the new Iraqi administration to remain after it assumed office on July 1.

In contrast, Latham said that if a new Government was democratically elected in Baghdad according to the US timetable, Labor would pull Australian forces out by the end of the year if it won office.

Latham also continued to attack Howard on links between terrorism and participation in the war.

"We were a target at the time of September 11 [attacks on the US], but the errors that were made in participating in the Iraq war have obviously made the situation worse," he said.

Yesterday's Newspoll also placed support for Latham as preferred prime minister at 42 per cent, only one percentage point behind Howard, and said the Opposition was now front runner for the coming election with 55 per cent support against the Government's 45 per cent.