According to the national Australian newspaper today, Australian PM Tony Abbot and his senior advisers seriously floated the idea that Australia attack IS in northern Iraq on our own with 3,500 troops.
In our opinion, that he could even think it, even in passing – even, if as charitably as we could put it, he was simply “floating options” – this lunatic suggestion proves him manifestly unsuited to high office. Blind Freddie could see that anything remotely resembling that action would be a suicide mission.
Personally we wouldn’t let him run a kindergarten, let alone a country.
How seriously Abbott considered the idea is hard to tell, but the story continues that this is not the first time Abbott has suggested committing troops to a boots on the ground deployment that the military planners had to hose down. He also apparently suggested that 1,000 Aussie men and women be sent to guard the site of the MH17 Malaysian airliner shot down over the Ukraine which killed 38 Aussies.
According to the Australian “leading military planners” had to point out to him that not speaking Russian or Ukrainian would have made their task just a tad tricky, and also that they would have had difficulty distinguishing between rebel and government troops.
The fact that they could have become embroiled in the conflict itself might have been a cautionary note, one supposes, although the story does not expand on that.
That somebody so ludicrously gung-ho could lead our Government and by implication our armed services is, surely, truly and deeply worrying. We can’t imagine your average service Joe or Josephine would be very happy at the news, nor their families and friends.
According to “insiders” quoted by the newspaper, Abbott sits for much of his day in Parliament House pondering national security, Islamic State, and reading Winston Churchill. A someone who is “weak on detail”, perhaps that’s an area he feels safe handling. Today’s revelations suggest his focus should be shifted elsewhere – fast.
The rest of the story by John Lyons, an Associate Editor of the paper, details in excruciatingly close focus the dysfunctionality of the current government, including ripping the coverings away from his much-disliked Chief of Staff Peta Credlin with a clarity we have not seen before, and how completely out of his depth Abbott seems to be.
And, of course, the near-inevitability of his replacement by the urbane and competent Malcolm Turnbull, which we have been predicting since before Abbott was even elected Prime Minister, for exactly the reasons that are now becoming so obviously clear.
But this latest revelation, we confess, has shocked even us, and we are old, wizened and cynical observers of the body politic indeed, Dear Reader.
What we wonder now is whether today’s revelations – carried, after all, in an outlet which is notable for its previous support of Abbott and the conservative side of politics generally – might be the final straw. Has a Murdoch-owned paper skewered yet another Prime Minister? We shall see.
You can read the “Exclusive” story in today’s paper. Online it requires you to subscribe – a detestable development in newspapers in our opinion – so we suggest you simply go and buy the paper.
As for when the axe should fall on the woeful Abbott, we can only urge the Liberal caucus to act. Enough is enough. We all know this is coming – get it done so the country can move forward.
It should be noted Abbott has subsequently denied the article. Does he really think anyone will believe him?
We have listened to his denial and are very doubtful.
Well, This Is What I Think 