Intr'usting piece.

The entire Hicks situation disgusts but doesn't really surprise me. Australian politics are very similar to the US model, we even have a less politicised version of Guantanamo that is Nauru. (Remember that place? whatever happened to those refugees?...)

The thing is... Australia doesn't have the same resources as the US, and our interests are subtly different. I'm not so sure our government is willing to believe that.

“..the presence of its troops there is not part of the solution but of the problem”. For one bunch of Iraqi’s killing another bunch of Iraqi’s? Come on! We are all fed up with the Iraq situation for different reasons, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. Iraqis are responsible for any killing they do. When, and if, foreign forces leave the hellhole, they will continue doing it. Now that Saddam has gone – or rather his monopoly on killing has gone – the lunatics will really get stuck into it, as Gary sort of admits; and we will be further plagued by “refugees” by the boatload as happened after the Reds kicked us out of Vietnam (where we shouldn’t have been in the first place). It is to be hoped that the lefties who like to see hordes of people coming here illegally are preparing for the influx.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and, ideally, foreign troops should have knocked off Saddam and left the Iraqis to work out the rest of it for themselves. But, that’s not what happened, and now a pullout would be irresponsible and harmful to Iraq and Iraqis. However, that is far too logical and sensible for politicians and totally impractical and naïve voters in the West, so there probably will be a pullout long before there is a chance see Iraq in reasonable condition so that Australia and other Western countries will not be inundated by people who find living in their own country intolerable.

On Australia’s foreign adventures in general, I wholeheartedly agree with Graham’s final paragraph

Leigh is correct why should Saddam have a monopoly on killing Iraqi's he killed 700,000, over the period of his rule. By contrast we have only killed 650,000 innocent men, women and children in our time there. We are catching up, the longer we stay, the more we kill.

What puzzles me Leigh is if they are having their own civil war anyway, why are we still there, it seems they will kill each other whether we are there or not, so why spend huge amounts of public money putting our people in harms way, when there are so many domestic issues to urgently deal with. Pardon, oh! George.W hasn't told us we can go home yet! One last small thing has anyone found a[1] weapon of mass destruction yet?

Very interesting article Gary.

If you were to add IR Laws and privatisation of Telstra you would have the Howard agenda pretty much completed.

It's probably easier to view the invasion of Iraq as 'armed boaties going the other way'.

The Hicks debacle continues to confirm my belief that Australia (and the US) has not been a democracy governed by the rule of law for some time.

Foreign troops are undoubtedly part of the problem. Hindsight is 20/20 but whatever became of foresight? If you care to re-read the newspapers of the weeks prior to the Iraq war, the one that John Howard repeatedly promised at the time we'd made no commitment to, you'll find no end of predictions what would probably happen. The left was saying it'd be a disaster; the right was using phrases like 'cake-walk'.

Would a pullout now be better or worse than a pullout in, say, 6 months? Depends on how many soldiers you're prepared to waste. The political situation can only be determined by Iraqis, in their own time.

As for the wider gist of the article, Australia's reputation under the coalition has certainly nosedived. A little introspection by the clowns in Canberra, at any point over the past few years, would've been useful

I don't agree with most of this but at least the guy has done some research unlike most moon-howling Howard-haters. Again, I'd like to see the left come up with some alternatives. What would you have done about Saddam, how should we deal with Indonesian human rights abuses etc etc? The left in this country needs to start presenting some alternatives otherwise you will continue to all howl at the moon and the electorate will not listen.