With the prime minister’s announcement of the expulsion of the Iranian Ambassador, Australia now has its own Iran Contra scandal.

The first involved greasy deals by the Reagan Administration in the United States in which it abridged self-imposed embargos against selling weapons to its sworn enemy, Iran. The proceeds were used to support Contra rebels in Nicaragua who were stirring the possum against that country’s Sandanista Government and so getting President Reagan’s goat. The US was messing with Nicaragua’s social cohesion but that’s another, and all too frequent, story.

Forty years later, Iran’s ambassador to Australia has been expelled because ASIO found, according to the prime minister, “enough credible evidence… to reach the disturbing conclusion that the Iranian Government has directed at least two attacks” on Jewish establishments in Australia last year – the Lewis Continental Kitchen in Sydney and the Adass Synagogue in Melbourne.

The discovery and the expulsion have been wildly well received and citizens should be pleased about reasonable steps to fight back against and deter antisemitism. But what’s that nagging feeling?

Well, the public has not been favoured with any evidence in support of ASIO’s assessment and it would appear that no charges have been made against individuals in addition to those already laid in the Continental Kitchen and Adass Synagogue cases.

ASIO director Mike Burgess says he “won’t comment on any matter that may go before the court” or “on any matters that are actually on foot”. That’s disappointing. It’s not been uncommon in other security/espionage cases for evidence to be gladly paraded. In the Delphic syntax for which Burgess has become notorious, he says that “security is a shared responsibility, and in the prevailing threat environment, national security is truly national security – everyone’s business”. It’s a pity the dimensions of this shared responsibility are so one-sided.

Burgess has, however, been able to say that neither the Iranian embassy in Canberra or any of its diplomats have been involved in the attacks. But booting out the Iranian ambassador and several of his staff punishes the innocent, as it were, while some under suspicion are allowed to remain in the shadows.

Then the government’s announcements are largely devoid of context and disingenuous about Iran’s motives.

Albanese says we “don’t want the conflict in the Middle East brought here”. However improbable that literally is, the ramifications of those conflicts have been inevitably here for a long time and they can be expected to linger.

Of course, the Hamas atrocities in October 2023 and Israel’s consequent genocidal campaign in Gaza didn’t roll up out of thin air. Excluding this catastrophe, according to the UN, since 2008, 7340 Palestinians have been killed and 163,318 injured and 370 Israelis have been killed and 6688 injured in Israel-Palestinian conflicts.

These terrible events have been fanned by inflammatory language on both sides – Hamas has called for the destruction of Israel and a struggle against Jews, while Israeli Government figures have said in the Gaza campaign “we are fighting animals”, there must be “an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza” and the aim should be “revenge, zero morality and maximum corpses”.

Trying to keep these long-running conflicts from causing upset in Australian society, with its significant Muslim and Jewish communities, is like trying to stop the tide from coming in. Rather than playing with ambiguous and futile notions of keeping the Middle East conflict off-shore, the focus of policy should be on minimising its harmful domestic consequences.

Albanese makes the obvious point that the Continental Kitchen and Adass attacks “sought to harm and terrify Jewish Australians”. Then, however, he muddies the water by claiming that they were “attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community”. Iran’s motivation is opaque, but undermining Australian social cohesion is improbable as Iran has no significant strategic interest in Australia and it is much otherwise distracted. Moreover, the attacks may well have improved social cohesion given the natural tendency to cluster around victims of misfortune.

If any country can complain about others damaging its social cohesion, it’s Iran. For most of the last century it was ruthlessly exploited for its oil. To protect their interests, in the early 1950s the US and Britain joined a conspiracy to overthrow Iran’s elected government. The result was to concentrate political power in the Iranian monarch, the Shah. With the aid of the US and other Western powers, he modernised his country, gave it great economic growth and made it the dominant military power in the Middle East.

Then it all turned to custard. As the Shah’s Government faded he said “For 15 years, everything I picked up turned to gold. Now every time I pick up gold it turns to shit.” In 1979, he skipped out of the country in the face of domestic turmoil. He was gravely ill and died a year later.

A revolution that is difficult to explain and harder to understand (some think it was an accident), replaced the Shah with a theocratic government led by Ayatollah Khomeini, a terrible poet (“Release me from these countless pains, from a heart and a breast cut in pieces like a kebab,” he wrote), with no experience of government and who’d been out of the country for 15 years. One of his early tricks was to create the Revolutionary Guard Corps, now in Albanese’s sights, because he feared, probably rightly, that the army could not be trusted and he needed a bulwark against it.

While there was plenty of blood, the revolution was not especially bloody by revolutionary standards. Still it brought a highly repressive government, a vicious legal system and riotous assemblies, one of which took over the US embassy in Tehran and held its staff hostage for a long time. That was the end of President Carter and the beginning of President Reagan and his Iran Contra shenanigans.

Within an instant, Iran changed from the best friend of the US and other Western countries in the Middle East to their worst enemy in the world. Iran was isolated internationally and contained as few others have been. During its savage war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from 1980-88, it was virtually friendless while major Western countries, the Soviet Union and others gave Hussein zillions. At the end of that war, in which hundreds of thousands were killed, most of them Iranians, Iran’s isolation was consolidated and re-enforced by economic sanctions and periodic military assaults. Is it any wonder the Ayatollahs have tried for variations on forward defence in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza?

In the last 15 years, Israel has attacked Iran dozens of times – assassinations, bombings, missile and cyber attacks, with the US recently joining in the bombing campaigns. In 2024, Israel killed three Revolutionary Guard generals in Syria and, of course, it has done immense damage to Iran’s allies in the region.

With Israel’s overwhelming military superiority, backed by the US, Iran can do little directly to respond to Israeli aggression, and attempts to do so risk massive retaliation, a Netanyahu forte. Iran has not been secretive about its tactics with Israel, to opportunistically assault Jewish interests anywhere and where the risk of retaliation is slight. So, to the extent it’s been behind antisemitic attacks in Australia, it’s most likely not to undermine Australia’s social cohesion; it’s because it wants reprisals against Jewish institutions and people.

The expulsion of its ambassador and others from Australia will be a flea bite to Iran. But Albanese’s actions draw on a strategy of isolation, containment and punishment that has failed for the last 45 years. That strategy has solidified its theocracy and contributed to its international misadventures. That is to say, Albanese’s decisions run the risk of making things worse, however marginally.

On a lighter note, let’s wind up with our good friend, ASIO director Burgess, whose burgeoning appetite for publicity is dragging his organisation into places it should not be.

As a collector and analyser of information and intelligence, ASIO should keep as far away from politics and policy as possible because influences from these quarters can distort the dispassionate assessment of information and what is collected. That’s why it’s an independent statutory authority, why it was taken out of the Home Affairs portfolio and why it’s a grave mistake to return it thereto. Sensible machinery of government principles rarely stand a chance against empire building.

But back to the ASIO director: In trying to play the statesman and speaking in the florid and often obscure language of politicians, Burgess jeopardises public confidence in the ability of ASIO dispassionately to assess intelligence. It’s risky and unbecoming for him to be saying, for example, that “Iran and its proxies literally and figuratively lit the matches and fanned the flames” in ways that were “messing with social cohesion in Australia”. And his jangling comment that the Iran Revolutionary Guards “through a series of overseas cut-outs facilitators to coordinators that found their way to tasking Australians” imports an obscurity into intelligence assessment it could do without.

That Burgess should think it necessary to say that “we do not believe the [Iran] regime is responsible for every act of antisemitism in Australia” does not display a healthy mindset. Who in their right mind would ever have such a suspicion?

Burgess should tone it down and stick more to his desk. And he should stop distorting the legal role of ASIO by calling it a “spycatcher”.

If he discovers nasties warranting the attention of ministers, he should provide them with a calm, unexcited report and answer any questions. Then he should retire to his office and leave ministers and their policy advisers to make their decisions and any announcement without him standing by the prime minister’s side and in front of other ministers, as he did last week.

To avoid the impression of the politicisation of his office, the secretary of the Department of Treasury doesn’t attend and make speeches at announcements of the prime minister and his ministers on the economy; nor should Burgess do so when ministers announce decisions on intelligence and security.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.