FOREIGN Minister Alexander Downer has accused Labor leaders from John Curtin and Gough Whitlam to Mark Latham of appeasement of Nazi Germany, communist Russia and Saddam Hussein, and provided a philosophical justification for invading Iraq and helping to free East Timor. Curtin had refused to join a wartime government with Robert Menzies and repeatedly said Australia did not have a role when the Italians invaded Abyssinia or when Hitler threatened to annexe Czechoslovak territory, Mr Downer said.
"In a time when bipartisanship was imperative in the national interest, Curtin had chosen from 1935 on to placate the international socialists, pacificists and anti-conscripts within his own party," Mr Downer said in a major speech last night.
"Even as late as the Munich crisis of September 1938, Curtin persisted with a policy of isolationism and failed to acknowledge the threat posed by Nazism." The Foreign Minister accused current Labor leader Kim Beazley of adopting "a little Australia" policy consistent with a "pattern of weak Labor leadership nationally, particularly on the issues of appeasement, isolationism and shirking international treaty obligations".
In a scathing critique of Curtin -- Labor's wartime prime minister -- and a damning judgment on Mr Whitlam over the Baltic states and Mr Latham over Iraq, Mr Downer said: "Only the Coalition is unequivocally committed to supporting the global struggle for freedom."
He charges Mr Whitlam with a "shameless sellout" of the captive Baltic nations of the Soviet Union: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Labor was a party that was happy to seek donations from the Baathist regime of Iraq during the 1970s, he said.
"In Timor, in the wars of liberation in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the overall war on terror, the Coalition has been sustained by the conviction that Australia is a significant country with international military and peacekeeping obligations," Mr Downer said in his speech at New England University in Armidale, NSW.
"Along with national capacity, we have a view of the national interest in which the successful prosecution of those wars and the success of diplomacy, in furthering the cause of freedom and democracy, is fundamentally important," the Foreign Minister said.
Mr Downer's comments echo the post-election speeches of US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who have both stressed the importance of spreading democracy in the Middle East.
US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice expressed similar sentiments in comments during a flying visit to Baghdad this week.
Delivering a speech in honour of the first Country Party leader, Earle Page, Mr Downer bracketed Curtin's appeasement with Arthur Calwell's isolationism, Whitlam's view of the Baltic states and the South Vietnamese and Mark Latham, who he said had "gone to water" over Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
"In 2003, Labor went to water on Saddam Hussein and his regime, declaring Iraq an irrelevance in the war on terror.
"There was no shortage of so-called realists prepared to tell us that democracy was unsuitable for export, and even that the Islamic world would never accept what they airily characterised as cultural imperialism by force of arms," he said.
"We have a view of the national interest in which successful prosecution of those wars and the success of diplomacy, in furthering the cause of freedom and democracy, is fundamentally important," Mr Downer said.
"The 'little Australia' mindset persists in the Labor Party," he said.
"No doubt, along with a preference for populist appeasement and isolationism, it played a part in Mark Latham's thinking when he argued that our contribution to the war on terror should be limited to our own region and that our troops' proper place was not on the other side of the world, but at home."
Mr Downer said it was too early to "reach triumphalist conclusions" but the idea that democracy could be used to find a way out of the "impasses of the Middle East can no longer be dismissed as naive".
"The much closer ties we now enjoy with Indonesia, relations with Afghanistan and Iraq, the momentum for change in Palestinian-Israeli relations - they are all encouraging signs for the future and for the prosecution of the war on terror."
