As part of its Anzac Day coverage the Sydney Morning Herald published a Department of Defence list of Australia's overseas military involvement under the heading WHERE OUR TROOPS ARE SERVING (23/4/10). I've omitted Border Protection (400); East Timor (404); and the Solomon Islands (80) to highlight our far greater Middle East involvement, reordered the Herald's list in order of numbers of troops involved, and added some explanatory information in brackets:
Afghanistan
Operation SLIPPER (Afghanistan) 1550
Operation SLIPPER (Middle East) 800
Operation PALATE II 1
Iraq
Operation KRUGER 80 (Protecting the Australian Embassy in Baghdad)
Operation RIVERBANK 2 (UN Assistance Mission for Iraq)
Egypt
Operation MAZURKA 25 (Australia's contribution to the Multinational Force & Observers (MFO) in the Sinai, a non-UN organisation established in 1981 to oversee the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979)
Sudan
Operation AZURE 17 (UN)
Operation HEDGEROW 8
Middle East
Operation PALADIN 11 (UN Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) established to supervise the truce agreed at the conclusion of the first Arab/Israeli War of 1948. Our involvement commenced in 1956)
The salient point here is that we currently have 2, 433 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq solely as a result of the former Howard government's servility towards the United States and the pathetic me-tooism of the Rudd government.
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