John Howard won by a narrow margin in Australia with a swing of less than 2% and James Taranto immediately branded it as a defeat for al Qaeda as if the whole election was fought on that issue. Australia has only 800 odd troops in Iraq and they have not suffered any casualities.
The election was not a referendum on the Iraq war because the issue was buried by the Labor Party and the mass media. Despite the mountain of evidence showing that the war was based on lies, Howard was never challenged by opposition leader Mark Latham, who maintained that the issue of
