Australia Deploys Jets To Middle East – Insists It Is Absolutely Not In A War

CANBERRA – Australia has sent fighter jets and missiles to the Middle East while simultaneously maintaining with a completely straight face that it is not involved in the war currently happening in the Middle East.

Defence Minister Richard Marles confirmed this week that Australia has deployed military assets to the region to “monitor the situation” – a phrase which apparently now includes armed aircraft.

“We are not a participant in the US-Israeli military actions against Ira,” Marles told reporters who then gestured politely at the jets.

“Those are… monitoring jets” said Marles.

Australia – which evacuated its nationals from multiple conflict zones this week while trying not to make eye contact with the question of whether sending weapons into a war makes you part of the war – has a long and proud tradition of being technically not in wars it is absolutely in.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said military planes could not be used for civilian repatriation because air spaces were closed – which is a reasonable position and also a sentence that contains the word “airspace” and “military planes” in it without apparently seeing the irony.

In regional Queensland a man named Glen said he didn’t understand the difference between “supporting a war effort” and “being in a war effort” and could someone please explain it to him at the next pub trivia night.

Glen was later contacted by the Department of Defence and told he had been thinking about it too hard.

Meanwhile Iranian oil facilities continued to burn and Australia’s fuel prices continued to rise and the government said it was monitoring that too.