cam: The Bush Administration: official who said they werent up for sale really didnt have the authority to do so. IIRC the Administration can deny weapon systems to a country (because they are dictatorships etc) by law that Congress has passed but the export nature of weapon systems are done through legislation. A Texan representation passed a bill to export the F22 through the House, but a Senate committee hid the bill and it never came to vote. The Bush Administration official who said in the Au news media that they weren\'t up for sale was doing a favour to Howard. IIRC it was after Howard did his Barack Obama and the Democrats are traitors or something. I suspect there was political horse trading between Howard and the Bush Administration.

Defence is one of the areas where Labor has better policies than the Liberals. Even though Labor made no guarantees to buy the F22, I think they just said they would look into it, it was an area of weakness for the Liberals that Labor was hammering on about it. So having a Bush Administration official say they could not be bought was sowing up that political weakness for Howard even though it wasn\'t legally true or possible. Howard has been digging his holes lately, especially in defence.

Political horse trading over defence is not cool. Especially when the solutions the Howard government have come up with as stop-gap measures are so obviously inferior - and just plain expensive. Unnecessarily so.

The three nations interested in the F22 were Japan, Israel and (tangentially) Australia. I am not surprised that Japan and Israel are pushing for it. We should be too IMO.

cam