Government knows best...

NOW that Alexander Downer and Mark Vaile have appeared at the Cole inquiry, the public can rate the men who will guide us through decisions like whether to help America attack Iran or what Australian jobs to risk in free-trade agreements.
That is the strange double-headed department encompassing Australia’s Foreign Affairs and Trade. The background of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is fleshed out in the Sydney Morning Herald (article link above).
I am more concerned about the minister’s and their boss, John Howard. All three have been on show in the past week, revealing their self imposed limits on governance.
In accepting UN’s Oil for Food Program, governments such as Australia also accepted a charge to ensure the program was not by anyone under their individual jurisdictions.
Evidence to date clearly shows the Australian government’s complete failure to uphold that responsibility.
Worse, rather than admitting failure the three top members of the government resorted to a mix of blame shifting and the old regulars like; ‘can’t recall’, ‘too busy’, ‘not my responsibility’…
These are the very same men who will take it on themselves to throw whatever international weight Australia still has behind another Bush folly, Iran.
If anything, the Oil for Food scandal is diverting attention away from the, even more serious, lies which were used to support the country’s involvement in Iraq.
While the scope of those lies continues to trickle out, and the fact that these three chose to turn a blind eye to illicit payments to Saddam’s regime, they are already preparing for another questionable intervention.

The issues in Iran are serious; there can be no doubt about that. They have been made more so by Bush’s follies; the mess in Iraq, a facile war against terrorism, a collateral anti Islamist push.
Remedies to Iran’s bluster have been made all the more difficult by the behaviour of Bush and his allies, including the Australian leadership.
Western leaderships are hardly in any moral position to preach restraint to Middle Eastern radicals. Any reasonable position has been well and truly undermined, which doesn’t leave much room to maneuver.
But the one remedy we cannot accept, must not accept, is a bots and all attack on Iran or any other country.
So our three bumbling Australian leaders have shown us the potential, the inability to pursue positive remedies. Bush, it seems, is on a mission to show how inept he is; on a daily basis.
For our part, we must do everything in our collective power to ensure that nuclear weapons are not employed either. To launch a nuclear attack against this potential threat will simply open the gates; create a precedent from which the world can never pull back.