SYDNEY, Nov 21, 2007 (AFP) - US President George W. Bush's last major ally from the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, is tipped to lose his job in elections on Saturday.

Every opinion poll for months has suggested that the conservative leader will be ousted by the centre-left Labor Party's Kevin Rudd, who has pledged to pull combat troops out of the war-torn country.

But Australia's involvement in the brutal conflict since the invasion on March 20, 2003 has played little role in the election campaign, being dubbed by one newspaper 'the unmentioned elephant in the polling booth.'

One reason for its low profile was perhaps best explained by a candidate in the US race to succeed Bush himself, Barack Obama.

Howard criticised the Democratic hopeful in February, saying his plan to pull US troops from Iraq by March next year would be a boon for Al-Qaeda terrorists.

Obama responded by suggesting that if Howard was so keen on the Iraq war, he should send another 20,000 Australian troops to join the mere 1,400 working with the US's 140,000 troops there at the time.

Australia's relatively small troop commitment and the fact that it has suffered no combat deaths in Iraq have made it possible for both sides to avoid making the war a major issue in the campaign, analysts say.

'One of the things that has characterised the campaign is an almost complete absence of discussion on foreign policy,' Deakin University's Damien Kingsbury told AFP, saying each side had its own reasons for avoiding the Iraq issue.

Howard has shunned it because polls have shown the war is deeply unpopular, while Rudd believes he already has the anti-war vote and does not want to open himself up to charges that he is soft on the 'war on terror', Kingsbury said.

But even if the war in itself would not be enough to ensure a Labor victory, it would be one of a clutch of issues which could help tip the balance against Howard and bring his nearly 12 years in power to an end, Kingsbury said.

Bush and Howard are the last two major partners in the 'coalition of the willing' that once included former prime ministers Tony Blair of Britain; Jose Maria Aznar of Spain; Silvio Berlusconi of Italy; and former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski.

While Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, has announced that the number of British troops in Iraq will be cut by more than half early next year, Howard has refused to set a timetable for withdrawal.

That won him a firm endorsement from Bush during a visit to Sydney in September. 'I admire your vision, I admire your courage,' Bush said.

'My own judgement is I wouldn't count the man out,' the US leader told a joint news conference when asked about Howard's election chances. 'As I recall, he's kind of like me: we both have run from behind and won.'

But a recent survey suggested Howard's loyalty to Bush might in itself play against him in the election.

The survey for Sydney University's US Studies Centre showed that while a large majority of 64 percent of Australians opposed the country's involvement in Iraq, even more -- 67 percent -- disliked Bush.

Close to three-quarters -- 73 percent -- believed Australia's decision to join the US-led 'war on terror' had made the country more of a terrorist target.

Given those figures it might have been expected that the Iraq war would have been a bigger issue in the campaign, but 'foreign policy doesn't usually figure that much in Australian elections,' said Monash University's Nick Economou.

'It did in 2001 after the World Trade Centre attack and in 1969 and 1972 when the Vietnam war was in its last stages.

'But this time it's only a very small number of troops, and they are elite troops while in the Vietnam war they were conscripted troops,' he told AFP.

The focus of the campaign has instead been on domestic issues, particularly the economy.