Most famous for inventing a bent stick that you can throw which then comes back and smashes you in the face, it would be fair to say that Australia doesn't really figure in our thoughts as much as some other nations.
That would probably explain why the Australian Prime Minister John Howard is usually left out of the bile reserved for Iraq War architects Bush and Blair. A firm supporter of the invasion in 2003, Howard rejected the anti-war call of the war being about oil by stating "We are not there because of oil and we didn’t go there because of oil, we want to give the people of Iraq a possibility of embracing democracy." A pretty conclusive denial from the balding Aussie so one can only imagine the colour he turned the air when his Defence minister swung his big size 9's straight into his plums by saying that access to Iraq’s oil was a key reason for sending and keeping Australian troops there.
"Iraq is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world, and Australians need to think what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq," Dr Nelson said. "We need to ensure, notwithstanding the significant natural resources that our country has been blessed with, that we are able to access the energy requirements in our region and throughout the world."
I sense a fact finding trip to the outback in this ministers near future as Mr Howard tries to fend off the outcry over his decision to help his pals liberate the Iraqi people not only from Saddam, but more importantly, from their oil.
3 comments:
Ooops! Your Freudian slip is showing, Mr Howard.
As someone who was living in New Zealand at the time that the Iraq invasion was launched, I can tell you that most of us were very proud at the time (and have gotten increasingly proud as time has gone on, and the facts of the matter have become more obvious) that our government elected to not 'muck in' with the US and the UK and Australia and Poland and, erm, Romania and, um, Palau... in the ill-fated 'adventure'.
A lot of Aussies are now wishing their own government had balls like that.
We all knew what it was about really, and not WMD's, terrorism, democracy or any of the other fig leafs they tried to place in the way.
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