With many lies and much hypocrisy, Tony Abbott is plunging Australia into another military adventure in Iraq.

There was his argument on 1 September: “What’s happening now is a humanitarian involvement; it is at the request of the Americans with the support of the Iraqi government.” Within hours, he was contradicted by the Iraqi ambassador in Canberra, who denied that his government had authorised direct arms drops to Kurdish forces.

Abbott isn’t interested in waiting for the invite. Nor is he interested in UN authorisation. As he frequently tells us, Australia is only waiting on the say-so from the White House to start deploying Super Hornets and AWAC surveillance planes. The Iraqi government is only an afterthought.

Abbott argues that Australia has to help crush the Islamic State (IS) because otherwise Australian jihadists will return home and wage war here. It is a fatuous and deceitful argument. The “homegrown jihadist” threat is a beat-up designed to stir anti-Muslim racism and to justify police-state internal security measures.

Even if we were to take it at face value, any “jihadi threat” in Australia would be made more, not less, likely by direct Australian military involvement.

Atrocities

Abbott says that we need to intervene to halt IS atrocities. But the atrocities are equally cruel on the side that Australia is now backing. The minority Shia government has terrorised the Sunni population in the north and helped to fuel the rise of the Islamic State.

The UN Human Rights Council found that the Baghdad government and its allies have been responsible for horrible atrocities. Militias allied with the central government recently opened fire on a mosque north-east of Baghdad, killing 73 men and boys, while Iraqi soldiers have shelled towns and carried out air strikes killing and injuring dozens of civilians. Abbott and US president Obama are quiet on these war crimes – let’s just run that video of the James Foley beheading one more time.

Abbott is lying about the military commitment already made. He says that Australia will not send ground combat troops; he knows that the public is hostile to this. But SAS ground forces will soon be operating; they will join hundreds of US special forces personnel who have the authorisation to kill IS forces.

We only have to look at the original “humanitarian” motivation to see how quickly the intervention can be escalated. Initially we heard only about food drops to help the besieged Yazidis stranded on a mountain. Now planeloads of machine guns are handed over to Kurdish fighters. Such “mission creep” is inevitable.

Abbott is making it up as he goes along. Obama has admitted that the White House has no strategy guiding its actions. How can it? The measures that might be required may involve implicit coalitions with the Syrian and Iranian governments, thereby angering longstanding US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel. The fact that Western intervention has no plausible narrative explains Abbott’s fears of scrutiny, even the feeble questioning that might emerge on the floor of parliament.

And feeble it would be, because Labor backs Abbott 100 percent. Shorten has tucked his general’s baton under his arm and marched in lockstep. Every speech Abbott can make about the crimes of IS, Shorten can go one further. Disgracefully, the ALP blocked with the Coalition to vote down an attempt by the Greens on 1 September to force a debate on the issue.

Labor’s deputy leader and foreign affairs spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek, a member of the party’s left faction, has been outspoken in her support for the Abbott government’s military preparations. As a Guardian columnist wrote, it’s a case of “shoot first, ask questions later”.

The Abbott government has been backed all the way by the Murdoch press. Greg Sheridan, who regurgitated every lie told by US president George W. Bush in 2002-03, is urging Abbott to ramp up military intervention. News Corp ran a story on 2 September that an Australian C130 transport plane carrying humanitarian supplies had been fired on by IS militants. The story was hosed down by the Air Force chief.

When human rights don’t matter

When the ongoing genocide in Palestine was recently escalated, Abbott applauded those responsible. The IDF and the cheering citizens of Sderot escaped being labelled a “death cult”. When hundreds of thousands of East Timorese died during the Indonesian occupation between 1975 and 1999, Australian politicians were deaf to their cries. So too with the West Papuans’ pleas for an end to Indonesia’s violence today.

And when Syrian revolutionaries were begging for anti-aircraft missiles to help them defend liberated territory from president Assad in 2012, they were offered nothing. Nearly 200,000 Syrians now have died at the hands of Assad. Certainly, the US’s friendly relations with the rulers of Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia demonstrate its lack of scruples when it comes to cuddling up to sectarians, beheaders, torturers and human rights abusers.

So this military escalation in Iraq is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. It is a cynical exercise to hold Iraq together under Baghdad’s authority, the better to control the flow of oil. The US wants to “stabilise” the Middle East under the iron heel of a range of dictators, princes and generals in order to protect its own interests.

The Arab Spring of 2011 shook it seriously as two of its allies were toppled by mass protests. The counter-revolution has now swept the region, and US military intervention, backed by Australia, will only entrench it further. Whatever lies Obama and Abbott tell, whatever bloody alliances they make, whatever war crimes they commit or support, they will do so to secure continued Western domination over the Middle East.