Chronic Snoozer:
Your points about Howard sucking up to US policy, and placing Australia in the terrorists sights with our almost unilateral adherence to the Washington neo-con doctrine are indeed accurate .
I therefore find it hard to reconcile your view that this makes the incumbents the lesser of two evils.
My reading of latter 20C Aus/US history suggests the APL are more likely to stand up to the US and break this doctrine than the Coalition.
Most of the world still stands appalled at the USA's abandonment of the Clinton era Multilateral foreign policy agenda, and arrogant dismissal of the UN protocols. Australia supported the US on this. It is now biting the US on the arse bigtime - and
now the US want UN support for an exit strategy in Iraq!
The sooner we disassociate Australia from the fundamentalist fringe running Washington and its foreign policy on behalf of Corporate America, and become a country with our own identity, ideas and culture again, the better.
Frankly I don't ever see Howard as the man to achieve that - not the way he and his government have attched themselves to the US and abandoned our more immediate region.
