The Iraq backlash

One fall-out of the Iraq conflict, now in its fifth year, is the steady stream of exits by leaders who supported the US action. Spain, one of the few European countries to align with the US, saw a change of government in 2004. Tony Blair stepped down from office earlier this year after a bitter and protracted struggle within his own Labour Party. His successor, Gordon Brown, has not so far disowned the government's involvement in Iraq but this issue, along with the problems that the financial sector is going through, has contributed to a less than spectacular beginning for his government. More recently, Poland, which had sent about 900 troops to Iraq, saw its government change, with the new prime minister vowing to bring the troops back. Over the weekend, John Howard, after having been prime minister of Australia for over 11 years, lost the elections and his own seat to the Labour Party, whose leader, Kevin Rudd, insists on bringing all Australia's 550 troops in Iraq back home. Mr Howard was amongst the most vocal supporters of the US, which seems to have hurt him, despite the relatively small number of troops that he had committed to Iraq.

These developments have important implications for the US, from a political and diplomatic perspective. A Democrat is widely expected to succeed President Bush and Hillary Clinton is equally widely expected to be that person. Notwithstanding her relatively strong position, however, she has a significant weakness in her support for the US campaign in Iraq, both in the early years and in the recent "surge". While it is still uncertain as to whether Iraq will remain the dominant issue in next year's campaign, her opponents for the Democratic Party's nomination are focusing their attack on the Iraq issue in an effort to eat into her lead. If Iraq remains a dominant issue going into the final stages of the campaign, it is conceivable that Ms Clinton's positions on it will come back to haunt her. However, regardless of the outcome in that election, the regular displacement of leaders who were broadly supportive of the US on Iraq will clearly change the diplomatic landscape for the US in the coming years, indeed they have already done so. The US can no longer take for granted international support on any issue and will have to look for new and different ways to engage other countries.

One clear example of this is Mr Rudd's commitment to signing the Kyoto Protocol, a move which Mr Howard had resisted. This leaves the US as the only affluent country not to have signed an international agreement that is a decade old. Global warming is the "hot" issue today, what with Al Gore and the inter-government panel on climate change having been awarded the Nobel Prize. Leaders around the world are going to be pressed into stating their positions and aligning their policies with the climate-change agenda. More generally, parties that have won or will probably win elections in the near future are likely to have positions on issues such as global warming, multilateral trade negotiations and so on, that are different from the stated American positions. To the extent that the Iraq conflict has contributed to this trend, for the US, it might well be a case of winning the battle but losing the war.