Howard the resolute hawk

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - When Australian Prime Minister John Howard tomorrow delivers what many expect to be a virtual commitment to war in Iraq, some of the most influential political and military leaders of the last decade will heave a collective shudder.

They include the general who took Australian troops to the Gulf in 1991 and his successor, former Labor and Liberal Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser, and former Governor-General Bill Hayden.

Leading a majority of Australians who oppose a United States-led invasion, the stellar anti-war cast has broadcast its message in collective letters to newspapers, in separate interviews on TV, radio and newspapers, and at public meetings called to oppose Howard's unflinching support for President George W. Bush.

Most Australians, including the Labor Opposition, prominent lawyers, aid organisations, churches and student groups, demand that Australia refuse to join an attack on Iraq without United Nations sanction.

Howard has refused to bow to critics of a policy that has already placed SAS soldiers, support troops, warships, helicopters and F/A-18 Hornet jet fighters in the Gulf.

Tomorrow he is expected to further articulate his resolve - and the increasing inevitability of war - in a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra.

But yesterday former Defence Department Secretary Paul Barrett, who last week launched an anti-war TV advertising campaign, hammered a policy he said had divided the defence establishment.

"This war will be a massive recruitment campaign for Osama bin Laden," he said.

"If you think about the various reasons why we should go to war, none of them are clear."

Earlier, retired General Peter Gration, Vietnam veteran, head of the Defence Force during the last Gulf War and now head of military supplier Tenix Group, told a peace meeting in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, that Australia should not join an attack on Iraq even with United Nations approval.

Gration said the focus on weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for US intentions to reshape the Middle East for its mid-term to long-term strategic goals - and Australian involvement - would be both against Australia's own interests and, without UN approval, against international law.

In a statement supporting concerns by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, Gration also warned that plans to impose a change of regime, occupation and a "puppet" government would be far more costly than the 1991 conflict.

"A new conflict seems certain to be more intense and destructive, and the human and environmental damage correspondingly much higher," he said.

Gration was one of the signatories of a letter condemning any involvement in a US-led invasion as a "failure of the duty of government to protect the integrity and ensure the security of our nation".

Other signatories included Gration's successor as Defence Force chief, Admiral Alan Beaumont, former Chief of Naval Staff Michael Hudson, Hawke, Fraser, Hayden, former Liberal leader John Hewson and Major-General Peter Phillips, national president of the Returned Services League.

In an interview in the Bulletin, Hawke further said war was not the only option, and described an attack on Iraq as immoral and stupid.