However Iraq’s Trade Minister Abdul Falah Al Sudany is furious and is threatening to cut trade deals after Australian soldiers opened fire on his bodyguards, killing one and injuring five others.

The shooting happened when the Australian troops were conducting reconnaissance of the route to be taken by an Australian trade delegation. The troops drove out of the minister’s compound, scouting the way towards the Australian embassy, when the minister’s bodyguards also sped out. The Australians mistakenly thought the vehicle attempting to overtake them was carrying insurgents, and opened fire, killing the driver. The furious Trade Minister said of future imports from Australia: "We don’t have to deal with these people."

The shooting comes as Australia is trying to revive the lucrative wheat trade with Iraq, following the row over Australia’s wheat exporting company paying $300 million in bribes to the regime of Saddam Hussein. However, on the day after the shooting, Howard did not even mention it when he gave a long speech in Parliament about the presence of Australian troops in Iraq. Opinion polls suggest Australians want their troops to come home where there are plenty of hotspots nearby, such as East Timor and the Solomon Islands, requiring military intervention.

In fact, Howard had a chance to withdraw his troops last week when Japan decided to pull out its 600 engineers from the southern province of Al Muthanna. The Japanese have been guarded by 450 Australian troops. So what did the Australian Prime Minister decide to do with this opportunity? He decided to keep the Australians in Iraq, and also to send them on a ‘riskier’ mission. His speech in Parliament on the new role was interspersed with catcalls from the Opposition parties as he said the Australian soldiers would move to Tallil where they would support the Iraqi security forces that they have helped train.

Instead of the previous purely defensive role with the Japanese, the Australians will now provide back-up for the Iraqi troops in direct military action. While the Australian Defence Force hierarchy has expressed its deep regret at the shooting of the bodyguard, Howard passed over it in his speech. Instead he talked about the hard work towards democracy in Iraq. He appeared to overrule his Defence Minister who said last week that the Iraqi deployment would be reviewed at the end of the week. Howard returned to his previous commitment that he would not be held hostage to a timetable for withdrawing the troops. "We will only leave when the job is finished," he said.

The Prime Minister would not disclose intelligence assessments for the new deployment, but said the new operational area for the Australian Defence Force had the lowest threat level in Iraq. That said, its new role would have higher risk, he told Parliament. Howard’s speech came as evidence emerged about the bizarre death of an Australian soldier in Baghdad. It appears that the soldier, Private Jake Kovco, accidentally shot himself with his own pistol while joking around with his mates. Kovco was attached to the same regiment that was involved in last week’s shooting of the bodyguard.

The inquest into Kovco’s death is making little progress, with one commentator describing the evidence as baffling. The two others soldiers in Kovco’s cramped hut in Baghdad say they did not see him pull out his pistol nor hear the weapon being cocked, despite both of them being only two metres away. The two roommates are skilled in the use of the Browning pistol but say they did not recognise the sound when the gun went off. Neither said they saw the pistol on Kovco’s head when he fell to the floor, fatally wounded. Other evidence is just as disturbing, such as Kovco’s unit having a risky gun culture which includes pointing guns at their own heads and pretending to pull the trigger. Thousands of civilians and soldiers have been killed in Iraq, but the forensic examination of Private Kovco’s unnecessary death stands in stark contrast to the image given by politicians of the military operation in Iraq.