SYDNEY - Australia should withdraw its troops from Iraq by Christmas unless Washington launches a high-level diplomatic offensive aimed at quelling the violence, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser said Friday.
Fraser, who led Australia from 1975 to 1983, said the US troop surge in Iraq had failed and called on Prime Minister John Howard, US President George W. Bush's staunch ally, to pressure the United States into alternative action.
"The situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate with more loss of lives, with even more hardship to Iraqi civilians," Fraser said in an open letter emailed to 187,000 members of a grassroots campaign group.
"The serious divisions within Iraq, unleashed by the war itself, have not been reduced. The Iraqi government has made no significant steps towards reconciliation and accommodation between the warring parties.
"This is a situation that cannot be controlled by military force. The troop surge, such as it was, failed. There were over half a million Americans in Vietnam," Fraser said.
Howard gave Australia's support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the nation currently has around 1,575 soldiers engaged in the campaign.
Fraser, a grandee of Howard's Liberal Party, said the time had come to open talks with all key players in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole, or to put pressure on Washington by pulling out Australian troops by year-end.
He backed the Baker-Hamilton Committee's recommendation that all regional players, including Iran and Syria, must be drawn into discussions before allied troops leave Iraq in order to avoid further chaos.
"Diplomacy now offers the only chance of a withdrawal accompanied by relative calm and peace," the former leader said.
"One of the things we should say to the Americans, quite simply, is that if the United States is not prepared to involve itself in high level diplomacy concerning Iraq and other Middle East questions, our forces will be withdrawn before Christmas," he added.
Fraser went further in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald in which he said Australia should join forces with fellow US ally Britain in order to "maximise Australia's leverage on the US to take it seriously".
The message for Washington should be, "You've got to do this, or we are out," he said. "We should do it in conjunction with Britain.
Fraser told the paper that the US and Australian approach to the "war on terror" was "stupid" and said he had spoken out in "frustration" with Australia's two major parties.
07/20/2007 04:57 GMT