Diplomatic Dancing

"All governments are run by liars & nothing they say should be believed." I.F. Stone

It seems only yesterday that this May 24 exchange between Kerry O'Brien and foreign minister Stephen Smith took place on the ABC's 7.30 Report:

O'Brien: Is this [expulsion of an Israeli 'diplomat'] wink-and-a-nod stuff where you... go through the diplomatic dance, but that at an intelligence level our spies say to their spies, 'Fair cop, guys. You've been caught at this. Keep your head down for a while and things will get back to normal fairly soon. See you soon'?

Smith: We have expelled, effectively, a diplomat. There will be necessarily a... cooling-off period so far as the relationship between our respective intelligence agencies is concerned.

O'Brien: Does that really matter? I mean, what does it actually mean in reality?

Smith: Well it does. No, no; it is very important, Kerry.

Now here's Smith, less than 3 months later in The Australian Jewish News saying that we've kissed and made up: "I am very confident that things are now back to business as usual... Often when you have a difficult issue that you've got to manage, your capacity to manage that and then to move reasonably quickly off it reflects the strength of the [Australia-Israel] relationship... I'm very confident now that in terms of agency-to-agency relations, government-to-government, nation-to-nation, it is business as usual'. He added that at no time during the diplomatic impasse did the two countries' intelligence agencies stop cooperating to quash the rogue Iranian regime. 'One area [of the Australia-Israel relationship] we did not want to see disturbed was the ongoing cooperation and exchange of information on Iran', he said." (Smith charts positive course for Australia-Israel relations, 13/8/10)

Those last two sentences are most interesting. Not only do they indicate that the cooling-off was, as O'Brien suspected, a total sham, but, if the AJN's paraphrased sentence is to be believed, Smith seems to be indicating that Australia is actually cooperating with Mossad to bring about regime change in Iran. (If, BTW, you think that's a tad far-fetched, please read my 29/5/10 post All the Way With Mossad?)