Mark Steyn on John Howard:
Of all the doughty warriors of the Anglosphere, Howard, his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and their colleagues had the best rhetoric on the present war, and I often wished the Bush Administration had emulated their plain speaking.
A better one-sentence take on the Hawk Pundit view of the world could hardly be imagined. Howard and Downer aren’t warriors, they’re politicians. And they’re not “steadfastly courageous” — that’s an attribute of actual warriors who do fighting. Indeed, Howard was also at pains to avoid Tony Blair’s mistakes and not put much of anything actually on the line in Iraq. But like the doughty war pundits of yore, he offered solid rhetoric thus ensuring their spots in Valhalla.
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