It won't be often that you find a Liberal Party campaign video here. However, this exception is well worth looking at. When our Prime Minister was Leader of the Opposition in the runup to the Boy Emperor's Mesopotamian Adventure, he really wanted us to be right there, "Ready, Aye, Ready" with Tommy Franks's motorized legions, blazing up the Tigris-Euphrates River Valleys to the Battle of Baghdad. That mission has turned out somewhat badly and Harper doesn't like to talk much about that long ago time — with good reason. However, this could bring the whole embarrassing episode back to centre stage. The Star, where I found this, wrote that "Harper parroted Howard's own arguments...." Not exactly. That would have involved some work — like changing a word here and there. The speech is lifted pretty much verbatim from Howard's. The most charitable explanation for Harper's speech is plagiarism. The war got underway that day (20 March 2003) and there wasn't time to write something good of his own. John Howard's speech looked pretty good. It was made in Australia. Who'd ever check? However, there are less charitable explanations. We know that the White House Iraq group was treating this war as if it were an ad campaign. Do you suppose that they might have circulated "talking points" to likely members of the Coalition of the Willing?
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