Former Australian prime minister John Howard had begun planning to pull combat troops from Iraq and raised the issue with US officials before he was voted from office, a party spokesman said Sunday.
Conservative leader Howard, a friend of US President George W. Bush and a staunch supporter of the US-led coalition in Iraq, had repeatedly refused to name a date for the removal of Australian troops from the country.
Iraq was a key point of difference at last November's election, which saw Howard's Liberal Party government swept from office by a centre-left Labour Party promising to bring combat soldiers home swiftly.
Liberal Party foreign affairs spokesman Andrew Robb said Sunday that Howard would have begun withdrawing soldiers this year if he had been re-elected.
"As (Australian Defence Force chief) Angus Houston said the other day, no matter who had won government, that removal was going to take place," Robb told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"We had already started discussions with the Americans on that front.
"In August last year, and during the campaign, John Howard quite explicitly - and (then foreign minister) Alexander Downer explicitly - talked about (how) a time would come this year when we would start to replace combat troops with training troops."
Although he said he supported a greater training role for Australian troops in Iraq during the campaign, during his prime ministership Howard repeatedly said the soldiers should stay until the job was done and that leaving would only boost insurgents.
In July 2007, Howard said a military source's claims that he had a secret exit plan was "absurd." Last week Air Chief Marshal Houston told a parliamentary hearing that Australian troops had completed their mission in Al-Muthanna and Dhi Qar and the pull-out would likely have occurred even without a change in government late last year.
Australia is preparing to remove its 550-strong battlegroup from southern Iraq by the middle of the year.
It will still have about 1,000 military personnel in and around Iraq, including a 110-strong security detachment in Baghdad, and personnel for Hercules and Orion aircraft based outside Iraq and a warship in the Gulf. The US and UK are also preparing to reduce troop numbers in the months ahead.
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