Political evasions and half-truths are shaping Australia’s response to the US-Israel attack on Iran, undermining honest debate about legality and policy.

Democratic government is, in a sense, a debating society impelling the tactics of half-truths, the suppression of inconvenient evidence and, alas, a tolerance of bullshit. These influences wax and wane and at the moment in Australia they may be waxing because of:

• the insidious effects of modern technology allowing the rapid and extensive spread of rumours and worse;
• the decline of serious newspapers, many of whom now appear to assume their readers have attention spans of a spaniel, with column inches mostly taken up with criminal atrocities, tales of personal misfortunes, entertainment and sport;
• weak leadership of the major political parties – Albanese, Marles, Taylor, Hume and Hanson may be the least impressive quintet to be at the head of major political parties at the federal levels for a long time; and
• the over-weaning concerns of politicians, especially Ministers, about short-term political management that distorts and leaves less time for serious policy effort – Albanese seems to have as many media advisers as policy ones.

In these circumstances bullshit is more prone to breach its banks with corrosive and baleful consequences.

And so to the case of the Albanese government’s support for the Trump-Netanyahu bombardment of Iran.

Australia, of course, has been a consistent backer of US military adventures. Howard joined in the invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Menzies sent troops into the American war in Vietnam because he believed that would help stop Communism from sweeping down to Australia leaving us with a dictatorship of the proletariat operating on diktats from Moscow and Beijing.

Iran, of course, is a threat but it is not the existential threat to Israel that Israel is to Iran. In the lead up to the current war, no evidence has been provided of an imminent Iranian attack on Israel or indeed US interests in the Middle East and there’s no evidence Iran has been racing to make nuclear weapons the potential for which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” last year.

Yet with the build up of US forces in the Middle East, a US-Israel attack on Iran became inevitable. That is to say, the risk of imminent attack was that of the US and Israel on Iran, not the other way around.

When Albanese supported the US and Israel, the inevitable next question was whether he believed the adventure was legal and consistent with his professed adherence to the “rules-based order”. In this awkward position he could have been guided the advice of Mark Twain who suggested that when in doubt, tell the truth. And he had a model in the Canadian PM who, notwithstanding his support for the attacks on Iran, said that the US-Israeli attacks “would appear to be…inconsistent with international law.”

Instead Albanese (and Marles and Wong) deflected the question saying that the legality of the bombing of Iran was a matter for the US and Israel. It’s to be hoped this line was advised by a PR genius in Albanese’s office rather than it coming from the public service. Whatever, it’s rather like saying that the question of the legality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a matter for the Russians, not a thought that seemed to have occurred to Albanese at the start of that war which he said was “a blatant violation of international law”.

What’s happening is as plain as a pikestaff. Albanese and his Ministers have dodged the question about the legality of the bombing of Iran so as not to offend Trump, whose foreign policy is significantly organised around revenge on those who dare to not agree with him. If Albanese couldn’t match the Canadian Carney’s comments, he might have been better off saying that as he didn’t want put Australian interests at risk, he’d keep his counsel – nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.

At least at the time of writing Australia’s backing for the US-Israeli bombardment of Iran is mainly as a barracking accomplice, although there are signs of more direct commitments are in the pipeline. And don’t mention the Australian sailors on the US submarine that sank an Iranian naval ship or Pine Gap.

Yet there’s abundant room for unease as the US-Israeli attacks and Australia’s accommodation of them have been accompanied by much bullshit, an invariable perverter of policy.

In his notable essay _On Bullshit_ the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt argued that the bullshitter is worse than the liar. He said that “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows what the truth is” and that “a person who lies is…responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.” But for bullshitters, Frankfurt said, “all these bets are off” as “He does not reject the authority of the truth as the liar does…he pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

That’s pure Trump who, to put it in the superlative terms he favours, may be The Greatest Bullshitter of all time.

The Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Steven Kennedy, recently said that “Without trusted information, choice – real choice – becomes an empty concept.” How true.

As trusted information about the attacks on Iran is being drowned in an ocean of bullshit, real choice about sensible decisions for the Australian government or anyone else has indeed become pretty much an empty concept. Trump changes his objectives just about every day and can’t say what success will be for him. At least Netanyahu is consistent – he wants to destroy the Iranian government and as much of its country as he can.

As many have said, it’s impossible to say how all of this is going to pan out. It might be a reasonable bet, however, that Trump-Netanyahu’s aggression, cheered on by Albanese, will make for lots of badness, not only for Iran but for many others, especially in the medium to longer term.

It’s the sort of thing that can happen when bullshit is allowed a prominent place in policy.