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Downer slams Labor over Iraq pullout plan
The Foreign Minister has strongly condemned the federal Opposition over its promise to remove Australian troops from Iraq. The Labor leader, Kim Beazley, says if he wins the election, he would immediately talk to the United States about how quickly Australian forces could be replaced in Iraq.

The Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, told Parliament it is a weak and gutless policy. "The leader of the Opposition's proposition is that this great country would pullout its forces and ask others to do the job for us," he said. "[He] would go to our allies, the Americans, and the morally bankrupt way the leader of the Opposition proposes, and say to the Americans 'find someone else to do this job we are too weak to continue with it'."

The Opposition has hit back at Mr Downer. Labor's foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd calls the Iraq war the single greatest foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War.

He has questioned how Mr Downer can claim to be proud of the Government's role in Iraq. "Mr Downer therefore, I presume, is proud of the fact that 655,000 per the Lancet 50,000 Iraqi civilians lie dead since the invasion of March 2003, Mr Downer is proud of the fact that 100 Iraqi civilians are killed each day in Iraq, he's proud of the fact that this has involved the expenditure of $1.9 billion of Australian taxpayers funding without any exit strategy in sight," Mr Rudd said.
Posted by: Oztralian 2006-10-17
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=168891