Brown has a bob each way and is left with no place to stand on Iraq

US President George W Bush thinks the September 11 commission got it wrong. Despite the finding of no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Mr Bush insists terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s activities in Iraq are proof enough Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots.

Al Zarqawi is such a baddie, insists Bush, because he is “still killing innocents inside of Iraq”. Sound familiar?

It should be familiar to Senator Bob Brown watchers. Brown’s diatribe in the Tasmanian Parliament on April 4, 1991 echoes Bush’s words. Here’s what the future Bush Jnr heckler said back then: 

The House calls on the Prime Minister Bob Hawke to act immediately to put pressure on Australia's allies to intervene in Iraq to stop the slaughter of the Kurds and establish their right to self-determination ... we're in the disgusting position of sitting on our hands while these people are absolutely slaughtered - the least we can do is get our Prime Minister to speak up and put the full weight of this country towards the protection of these innocents.

What a noble enterprise it is to – protect the innocents! Kipling could scarcely surpass such an eloquent call to arms if he were still alive. The white man’s burden weighs heavily on Bob Brown – or so it did 13 years ago.

George Bush Snr and his then Australian lieutenant Bob Hawke resisted the urgings of Brown and the other would be neo-imperialists’ call to liberate the Kurds back then. However, George Bush Jnr and his Pacific sheriff John Howard have taken up the challenge and done exactly what Brown demanded all those years ago.

And guess what? Bob doesn’t like it. The liberation of Iraq he considered so important in 1991 is suddenly tantamount to a war crime.

And the brave dissident Brown told Bush Jnr as much in a joint sitting of federal parliament last year, clearly relishing the international attention he attracted for all of 10 seconds.

Brown’s posturing is undoubtedly hypocritical: one minute Australia is “sitting on its hands” as Iraqis are butchered, the next it is breaching international law by participating in the intervention he demanded.

In fact, hypocrisy is the key to Brown’s political strategy. He’s the leader of a minor party with marginal influence on actual events. Sure, the Greens might be able to use their Senate numbers once in a blue moon to influence proceedings - provided Labor needs its votes - but Brown doesn’t want any genuine responsibility.

Rather, Brown simply wants to be in the limelight. He is desperate to retain his mantle as messiah to the hideously over-educated inner-city leftists that can’t bring themselves to vote Labor. In order to keep his lucrative gig on track, Brown has to cast his adversaries as unprincipled, even if that means holding contradictory positions on a variety of issues.

Given Brown’s concern for Iraqis, shouldn’t he now be applauding the arraignment of Saddam on war crimes charges? And isn’t there further cause for joy now that "Chemical Ali”, whose suppression of the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 made the action taken against Brown’s beloved Kurds look like a tea party, is also in the dock? Alas, the senator remains silent.

These nifty shifts in ideological emphasis demonstrate that Brown possesses “enviable intellectual suppleness”, to use the immortal words of Sir Humphrey Appleby. But surely Brown’s environmental views are just as fickle?

Who can forget the sight of the committed environmentalist Brown, striding almost arm in arm with Mark Latham through the Tasmanian wilderness in March? In front of a media scrum in the Styx Valley, Brown lauded Latham as a “Prime Minister in waiting” and insisted that "a political leader doesn't come into the thick of a forest controversy like we have here without being fair dinkum about trying to get a good outcome for the nation”.

Fast forward a few months and Brown, peeved that Labor has welcomed Green-friendly Peter Garrett into its ranks, dismisses Latham as being “tied to the last-century belief that the best jobs are attached to chainsaws”. The Labor leader, according to Brown, was no longer an admirable visionary, but a dangerous reactionary.

And what of Brown’s own recruitment practises? Earlier this year he happily endorsed Andrew Wilkie - a career army officer and spy - as Greens candidate in John Howard’s Sydney electorate Bennelong.

Not quite the portfolio of experience one would expect Brown to value so highly, especially when one considers Wilkie’s CV also boasts a stint at one of America’s largest arms manufacturer Raytheon, where to use Wilkie’s own words, he acted as a “gun runner”.

Far from regarding Wilkie’s employment history as a matter of concern, however, Brown insisted it was all the more reason to conclude his new recruit was a “fantastic candidate” and claimed his career in armaments facilitation had been a “bonus” for the Greens. The only thing more absurd than Wilkie joining the Greens would be Adolf Eichmann joining the editorial board of Commentary.

But the Bob Brown show will go on, and inevitably he will attract the publicity he craves, no matter how many beliefs he has to ditch or reinstate along the way.

Australian democracy ultimately benefits, albeit unwittingly, from the opportunism of Bob Brown, who continues to air the sort of alternative views that need to be heard.

Let’s all hope he continues, with all the fanfare we’ve come to expect, to make his self-serving little stands, no matter how contradictory and unprincipled they may be.