Last call cafe. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

He paused. His eyes hardened. He leant forward. His arm lifted, his forefinger wagged. “WE will determine the foreign policy of this country. We WON’T have it determined for us by the United States of America.”

Simon Crean in Parliament today, in the most important speech of his life – the speech which laid out the battlefield of the terrible division this country now faces – played John Howard on October 28, 2001 at the Liberal Party campaign launch.

John Howard paused. His eyes hardened. His arm lifted, his forefinger wagged. “WE will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.” That line became his election slogan. The crowd exploded, their feet pounded the floor, their cheers deafened the ears of those who sat frozen, appalled.

John Howard carried the majority of the Australian people with him as he thumbed his nose at international norms in handling refugees, as he turned their boats back and excised parts of Australia to avoid our legal obligations to him.

Fortress Australia. Australians loved it.

Now, the same John Howard has dismantled his fortress Australia, with unswerving, overt, unquestioning acquiescence to the United States wish that we help it invade Iraq, and it is he who has defied public opinion to do so. He is charged by Simon Crean, now speaking the people’s mind, handing over our sovereignty to a foreign power in reckless disregard of our national interests. Of committing our troops to a war which will increase the threat of terrorist attack on our nation, make us a target in a suspicious region, and take us outside the protection of a United Nations we helped found to look after us in a dangerous world.

“The Prime Minister today, in a reckless and unnecessary action, has committed Australia to war. We saw capitulation and subservience to a phone call from the United States. This is a black day for Australia,” Crean charged. The threesome – America, Britain and Spain – met in the Azores to decide to go to war, and “one of these countries, Spain, is prepared to commit our troops to war, but not their own”.

“These are the tragic circumstances in which the Prime Minister has placed us…you have turned your back on the Australian people”.

All of a sudden, Crean had the ‘gaul’ to call his team “a Labor government in waiting”, an alternative, he said, which “WILL be prepared to act in Australia’s national interests”. John Howard could have said that, and probably did, during the Tampa debate.

All the dynamics which made John Howard a hero after Tampa now threaten to destroy him as he destroyed Kim Beazley, and to save Simon Crean. Except that just as Howard was prepared to tear up international rules to get his way on Tampa, he is prepared to do the same to get his war on Iraq. But this time, Fortress Australia wants the security of UN endorsement, and fears not the UN, but the influence on him of the most powerful nation in the world.

This vicious debate, to be conducted in an Australia consumed with anxiety, fear and confusion, will split families and destroy friendships. Our troops know some of them will die in a war most of their fellow citizens do not endorse and which some of them believe will threaten our national security. For the first time in Australian history, a Prime Minister has committed us to a war Australians do not want, and that public opinion around the world opposes.

John Howard once charged Labor with subverting our national interest to United Nations refugee do gooders. Now he is charged with outsourcing the most crucial power of any Prime Minister, the power to declare war in the national interest, to a foreign power. America could not get its neighbour Mexico to vote for war on the Security Council, or its neighbour Canada to predeploy troops in advance of UN authority. But it could get Australia, a nation with clean hands in the Middle-East, a nation whose neighbour is the most populous Muslim nation in the world, a nation with its hands full protecting East Timor with UN authority, to follow wherever it led.

In the process, John Howard has destroyed the cohesion of the constituency he built post Tampa to remain in power. He has given Simon Crean the chance to bring back the constituency Labor threw away to protect itself from the power of Howard’s Tampa policy, to take back Howard converts, and to eat into those in Howard’s traditional Liberal constituency opposed to Australia’s participation in its first war of aggression without UN approval or neutrality.

The war on Iraq has yet to begin. Australia’s war – for its identity, it’s place in the world, and the values by which it engages with its citizens and the world – has just begun its final, brutal phase.