John Howard's Next Big Gig?

I was checking out Prof Q's earliest blog posts when I noticed this one from June 24, 2002 (only his fifth blog post ever), about the (ahem) International Democratic Union, to which John Howard had recently been elected President (taking over from William Hague).

It was a fairly big story back then. Bush introduced Howard at a gala White House dinner, with defiant pre-Iraq War language:

We face cold-blooded killers that hate the freedoms we cherish. And with the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology, freedom's enemies could attain catastrophic power. And there's no doubt that they would use that power to attack us and to attack the values we uphold.

It is our commitment to freedom and human dignity and the strong belief that each individual matters that sets our enemies against us and draws our friends together in a great coalition of liberty. We will oppose the new totalitarians with all our power. We will hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.

And we must never hate -- hesitate to speak for what we believe.

Even Clarke and Dawe covered the International Democratic Union story:

JOHN HOWARD: Actually, it's not a union.

I'll have that changed.

It really should be the international democratic enterprise or something.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

What does it do?

JOHN HOWARD: It does whatever America -

INTERVIEWER: Beg your pardon?

JOHN HOWARD: Good question, Brian.

So here's the latest news from the IDU:

IDU Chairman John Howard will chair the next meeting of the IDU Executive, to be held in Sydney on 21 April.

I wonder if Howard will be handing over the reins to a new chairman? And if so, who would want the job? Sarkozy? Rumsfeld? Nelson?