Boots on the ground as Iraq must be saved!

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It’s back into Iraq we go. From The Australian:

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott has refused to rule out deploying Australian troops on the ground in Northern Iraq — the first such mission in more than a decade — to assist in the humanitarian protection of the Yazidi people stranded on Mount Sinjar.

It is understood that the Australian C-130 planes already committed by the government will begin distributing Australian and other international aid into the area within days. Supplies are en route for loading into the planes, which are currently in Al Minhad in the United Arab Emirates.

But as the British escalate their involvement, commissioning four Chinook helicopters to begin evacuations as well as armed Tornado aircraft to pinpoint air drops more accurately, Mr Abbott also committed “unused capacity’’.

“We are consulting with our partners, including the US and UK about what further assistance Australia can give,” he said after a telephone conversation with British Prime Minister David Cameron and meetings at Whitehall in London with British foreign secretary Philip Hammond and defence secretary Michael Fallon.

“The disposition of the Australian government is to provide what assistance we reasonably can to protect people who are at risk, not just from the elements, from starvation, from dehydration, from exposure on Mount Sinjar, but also people who are at risk from Islamic State forces because what we have seen over the last few months is murderous intent by ISIL.’’

Leaving Iraq to be dismembered by ISIS after we pulled it apart wouldn’t be exactly moral high ground but let’s at least go in with our eyes open. In realist terms this is a renewed coalition of willing acting as fig leaf for failed US Iraqi adventurism.

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It poses an interesting question. Does Tony Abbott and his government see it in these terms? They are so full of Catholic fervour at times that I would not be at all surprised if the Prime Minister is actually serious when he characterises this as moral foreign policy. Someone might like to ask him that question.

Hopefully this early commitment will play out in the same way that it did under the hard-nosed realism of John Howard. We were assigned relatively cushy military deployments and, had we not demanded a self-destructive FTA, would have got out if it virtually unscathed.

So long as one doesn’t mind the enduring perception in the Asian region of being a US lap dog, that is!

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.