Captain Abbott of Team Australia is perhaps in need of a reminder of George Santayana’s well known saying, often repeated by others, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

I’m old enough to remember the Vietnam War, and how that tragic conflict began with the provision of logistic support, followed by advisers, training, and back up of South Vietnamese forces and then the provision of Australian combat troops.

For the not-so old, and equally disastrously, in 2003, and with the false justification from flawed intelligence, Australia followed the USA into a disastrous war in Iraq.

The result was nearly 5000 coalition troops and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, and a less stable nation than it was before the "coalition of the willing" attacked.

And we are still reaping the consequences, 11 years later.

As the Sydney Morning Herald headlined, ‘Abbott has learnt nothing from history’ as he commits Australia not only to humanitarian aid, but also to military equipment, and has not ruled out combat troops..

We have all seen the atrocities emerging from Iraq, as the brutal ISIS commit horrific acts of barbarism in an attempt to fill the power vacuum years of strife and instability in the region has created.

But Western nations sending in armed forces, without a specific mission, with no clear objective and no end in sight, is how we ended up here.

That's why the Greens' bill to require a vote of parliament to send our servicemen and women to war (Senator Scott Ludlam Media Release 3 September) seems eminently appropriate to me.

To leave such an important decision up to the prime minister is surely not right.

To commit a nation to any warlike activity surely needs to be a democratic decision.

Other nations across the world, by either law or convention, require their parliament to approve the deployment of troops to war.

In the USA it's a vote of Congress.

In the UK it's a vote in the House of Commons.

In Germany it's the Bundestag.

Parliamentarians here speak at great length about the magnitude of such a decision. And they're right.

It's precisely for that reason that these decisions should be scrutinised and debated, and the MPs held accountable for their decision by their electors.

And on top of confirming for the first time that Washington has made a "general request" for more military help from Australia in Iraq, Mr Tony Abbott told Parliament on Wednesday that Australia was considering sending "civil and military capacity-building assistance" to Ukraine.

Perhaps that is why Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was, last week, hobnobbing with presidents, prime ministers and military chiefs at the NATO meeting in Wales.

And there I was thinking she was in need of a geography lesson, having confused the South Pacific with the North Atlantic.

And as John Birmingham wrote, “War drums muffle unrest back home”.