They are a cynical pack of bastards!

Every day of Australia’s Cole Inquiry makes it even more clear just how base and cynical the political class really is. The story is simple enough: while Australian troops were being deployed in the war against Saddam’s regime Australian trade officials were complicit in allowing nearly $300 million in kickbacks to the regime.

Australia had around 2000 personnel deployed in Iraq during the war, among the top five troop contributors in the coalition. The Desert Voice April 27, 2005
There were, of course, many more US service personnel, all put at extra risk by the illicit payments which it seems were know of and ignored by the US government. The whole affair is tantamount to ‘aiding and abetting the enemy’ and shows how little governments really care about the troops they so cynically use.

Soldiers' offspring asked to join fight
If that is not sick enough, try this little political masterpiece. In order to garner support for the continuation of the monopoly wheat export system in Australia, the system at the heart of all this duplicity, senior government ministers are organizing the descendants of the struggling soldier settlers from previous wars.
Hundreds of returned soldiers were granted land after World War I and resold later to World War II veterans in what has become rich wheat growing country. Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals leader Mark Vaile will address farmers, as will Senator Bill Heffernan, a close ally of John Howard.
Vaile is to call on the history of the wheat industry before World War II and during the Depression to highlight the difficulties before the establishment of a single desk.
Heffernan says "While ever the United States and Europeans have corrupt markets based on farm subsidies and cartels running fertilizer costs there cannot even be a remote chance of Australia giving up the single desk.”
If you were ever in any doubt about Iraq being a trade war, they should be dispelled now. Not that it really matters. Where once these cynical bastards might appeal to patriotism and other abstract emotions today the appeal is obviously and directly to greed.