Howard seen using Bali blasts to win support on Iraq

Howard seen using Bali blasts to win support on Iraq

Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters, Canberra

Relatives of Australian victims of last year's Bali bombings accused Prime Minister John Howard on Tuesday of playing on public emotions by using their loved ones to garner support for a war against Iraq.

Howard, a staunch supporter of the U.S. hard line on Iraq, has appealed to Australians to remember the 89 Australians who were among 202 people killed in Bali last October if Canberra decides to join any war against Iraq.

"This is a last-ditch effort to get support. Nothing else has worked so Howard is now going on emotions," Brian Deegan, whose 22-year-old son Joshua was killed in Bali, told Reuters.

"It is unjustifiable to attack Iraq and I don't want innocent Iraqis killed in my son's name. This is more than distasteful." Maria Elfes, whose sisters Dimmy and Elizabeth Kotronakis died, also accused Howard of exploiting emotions for political gain. "I don't think you can use the memory of 89 people as an excuse for war," she told Australian media.

The majority of Australians oppose involvement in a war against Iraq without United Nations backing.

Australians were deeply shocked when the Oct. 12 bomb blasts ripped through nightclubs packed with foreign tourists on the neighboring Indonesian island of Bali, rattling a nation that had previously felt isolated from such acts of violence.

As the final deadline on Iraq looms, Howard has stepped up rhetoric linking Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction to the possibility of more terror attacks like that in Bali, saying Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could arm extremists.

"We lost (89) Australians in Bali...and I will, amongst other things, be asking the Australian people to bear those circumstances in mind if we become involved in military conflict in Iraq," Howard told New Zealand television on Sunday

Howard, a close ally of U.S. President George Bush, said his Bali comments might have been "misconstrued" but he was making no apologies for linking Iraqi weapons to future acts of terror.

"If we don't disarm Iraq, and chemical and biological weapons get into the hands of terrorists, then we will potentially have more disasters than even Bali," Howard said on Tuesday.

Australia has only ever recorded one act of terrorism on its own soil -- when a bomb exploded outside a Sydney hotel during a Commonwealth summit in 1978, killing three people.

However Howard's conservative government was one of the first to send help in 2001 to the U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan to hunt down al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Howard said no decision had yet been made to join any military action against Iraq, whether U.N.-backed or U.S.-led.

But Canberra has already sent 2,000 troops, planes and warships to join 200,000 U.S. and British forces in the Gulf and there seems no doubt Australia will commit to war with Howard echoing the American condemnation of Saddam Hussein.