USA says jump , we say how high
Having learnt little from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Australia is ready to do Washington's bidding – again.
It seems it doesn't matter which party is in power in Canberra or in Washington, when that call comes from the White House, Australian prime ministers are too eager to wade in.
The word "coalition" is being avoided this time around – Tony Abbott's statement said that Australia would "join international partners" to airlift arms and ammunition to Kurdish forces in the north of Iraq.
This kind of deal invariably is dressed up to look clean enough at first blush. But Abbott's Sunday statement on the arms deliveries revealed the contours of messy dealings – as much in what it did not say as what it said.
The drops will be made to the breakaway Kurds in the north, not to the armed forces of the Baghdad government. And it seems that the extent of Baghdad, the sovereign Iraqi government's control of the drops might only be as part of a regional committee – the Australian contribution would be "co-ordinated with the government of Iraq and regional countries," Abbott's statement said.
It took many months and an exhaustive and ultimately fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction for the manufactured nature of the 2003 Iraq War to become apparent. Yesterday it took barely two hours for the confected nature of Australia's involvement in the continuation of that conflict to be revealed.
At 2pm, Prime Minister Tony Abbott rose to deliver a statement to Parliament on the government's plan to run arms to the Kurdish regional government. In doing so, he told Parliament that the operation had the "the support of the Iraqi government". It was different wording to that he had used on Sunday in making the announcement, when he referred to the operation being conducted "with the permission of the Iraqi government".
The views of the Iraqi government on the issue are, of course, somewhat relevant. Not only is that government -- a client state established by the United States -- also engaged in fighting Islamic State militants, but it is at least notionally the government of the Kurdish region as well and would have a view both on the operation of PKK terrorist forces in northern Iraq, who will benefit from our arms, and the ambition of the Kurdish population of that part of the country to establish an independent state.
At around 4pm, Sky News's David Speers interviewed the Iraqi ambassador to Australia. The arms Australia was providing should be going to the central government, he told Speers, not straight to the Kurdish regional government, comparing the situation to Iraq providing weapons to the Victorian government rather than the federal government. And he hadn't even had a discussion with the government about the issue; he was hoping for one sometime this week, perhaps when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop arrives back from the South Pacific. The fact that no one in the Abbott government had bothered to speak to the ambassador of the country we're about to return military forces to was a staggering revelation.
This, naturally, sat very poorly with Abbott's claim of Iraqi support, leaving the Prime Minister looking as though he had misled Parliament on the very serious matter of putting our defence forces in harm's way.
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Fortunately, the Iraqi ambassador's memory was jogged overnight. This morning, at an impromptu media conference as he emerged from the ABC's press gallery offices, he explained that the Iraqi government did indeed support Australia's arming of the Kurds, that Iraq had been consulted via "all the right channels between the two sides" "a couple of days ago" and that his remarks on Sky had been "misquoted" and "taken out of context" (presumably by himself). Baghdad, he explained, was quite happy for the Kurds to be armed. "They're Iraqis," he said, smiling, a statement that might draw a somewhat mixed response in Erbil.
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