Difficult as it is to look away from the Barnaby Joyce wreckage on the Australian government, it is worth sparing a thought for the fact that last weekend we possibly moved much closer to a major new war in the Middle East.
Nobody could describe the wars in Syria and Iraq as anything other than significant, but they have not involved big conventional clashes between big conventional forces.
Last weekend, some scribes are saying, was the first day of direct military conflict between Israel and Iran, with the US and Russia only a hair’s breadth away.
The bald facts are these. An Iranian base inside Syria, known as T-4 and located to the northwest of Palmyra, launched an unmanned aerial vehicle — a drone — into Israeli airspace. It is not known if the drone was armed or whether it was a stealth drone. It certainly seems to be modelled on US drones, which the Iranians have captured in the past and reverse-engineered.
The Israelis waited for it to come into their airspace and then shot it down with an Apache helicopter. Subsequently, the Israelis sent F-16 fighter aircraft to attack the base from which it was launched. One of the Israeli F-16s was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft missiles on the journey back over Israeli airspace.
This is the first time the Israelis have lost an advanced fighter jet in combat in several decades. And we know that during the past five years Israel has conducted about 100 single strikes on targets in Syria, mainly weapons supplies going from Iran to Hezbollah, or the launch sites of rockets or other fire aimed at Israel.
Read the report by Greg Sheridan in The Australian.