AUSTRALIA MATTERS

An interesting email from one of my American readers:

"Perusing your postings, it occurred to me that your readers might not realize just how important your forthcoming elections are. Not just for your country, but for the course of the entire free world.

Mr. Howard has shown a sort of political courage depressingly rare in our times. His unwavering commitment to the battle against Islamofascism and his support of the war in Iraq truly mark him as a "Profile in Courage" - not that the Kennedy Center will be giving him any such award in the near future. History, though, will mark him as a great and important man.

Like Winston Churchill a half-century before him, though, Howard faces the prospect (though I note with pleasure, an apparently less-likely prospect than it was weeks ago) of being cast aside by his countrymen at the ballot box as a prophet without honor in his own time.

I believe I am not overstating the case when I say this could have calamitous consequences for global polity and the future of Western Civilization. If Howard were to lose, it is rumored that his successor will immediately announce the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq. Given the degree to which John Kerry's sister appears to be meddling Down Under, and what we know of the Kerry clan, I don't doubt that this is true.

If it should occur, the Kerry campaign will immediately seize upon this as evidence that the policies of the Bush administration are so hideously misguided that even our staunchest friends are abandoning us. Our media will then proceed to trumpet this beyond all reason as cause for alarm and consternation. It will be presented as the beginning of a great unraveling of what John Kerry disgracefully calls "The Coalition of the Bribed and Coerced."

While things look good for Bush right now, this is the sort of thing, coming as it would less than a month before our American election, that might provide significant momentum for the Kerry campaign.

I am naive enough to believe that somehow, some way, right will triumph. But I am realistic enough to know that it doesn't happen by accident. George Bush was elected President in 2000 by 700 votes in Florida. John Howard could well be elected Australia's Prime Minister by the 70 - or 7 - votes it takes to elect his party's candidate to a single Australian Parliament district. That alone is cause enough for concern in normal times. That it might well tip the U.S. election to forces that would preemptively surrender to an enemy that knows no victory but worldwide Islamic government is cause for alarm in our own.

May fate be kind to John Howard. History doubtless will be."

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