The division is over whether New Zealand should send what the Key Government advertises as a training deployment to Iraq. The announcement of this decision, reported in these pages by Anna Powles, had been preceded by months of a painfully slow warm up act by a Government clearly uncomfortable about being seen to make any sort of direct contribution to combat. In prematurely ruling out a special forces role early on, the Government robbed itself of a contribution that might have been its most valuable. Mr Key's explanation of that limit – that this is Iraq's war to fight, and not New Zealand's – is an unconvincing balancing act born largely of domestic political calculations.
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