Sold out for Butter

Helen Clark sold out our troops for butter. That is what the latest Wikileaks documents say.

“Senior MOD officials (strictly protect) tell us it was not until Finance Minister Michael Cullen pointed out in a subsequent Cabinet meeting that New Zealand’s absence from Iraq might cost NZ dairy conglomerate Fonterra the lucrative dairy supply contract it enjoyed under the United Nations Oil for Food program, that the prime minister found a face-saving compromise and sent combat engineers in a non-combat role to Basra, where they were embedded with British forces.

“By then, however, the prime minister had so stirred up anti-war sentiment that she had to expend a lot of political capital to get Caucus and Cabinet support for this time-limited deployment.”

She was so opposed to sending troops to Iraq she dug herself a hole. While she secretly embedded our SAS with British forces so that we could say there were no troops in Iraq she also sent the Combat Engineers because Fonterra might lose a butter contract.

It wasn’t good enough to send them to help get rid of Saddam Hussein, it wasn’t good enough to send them to help re-build Iraq, but it was good enough to send them to keep a butter contract.

I fully expect all the pinko blogs who accused National of wanted to treat our troops like mercenaries to now turn on Helen Clark, because that is what she did. It wasn’t Iraqi freedom, or release from tyranny that prompted her to send troops to Iraq it was filthy lucre.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I was and still am in favour of sending our troops to hot spots. I have no problem with that. But what I do have a problem with is the sheer hypocrisy of the leftwing and labour in particular and that fact that their anti-war cant can just be swept under the carpet for a few shekels.