Mr Key says the New Zealand troops could join Australians, "badged as an Anzac unit". Asked why, he said "one argument could possibly be the 100 years commemoration of Gallipoli."
The idea seems to have come from Australia and that's where it should be just as quickly repatriated. For nearly 100 years, our military myth-makers have been trying to rewrite history and turn this unmitigated disaster into some sort of birthplace-of-two-nations sort of event.
But as actor Russell Crowe pointed out the other day, the truth is, we sailed half way around the world to give Johnny Turk a bloody nose, even though he'd never heard of us, or we of him, and woops, we lost. Badly.
Now, instead of seeing it as a time to apologise to the Turks for the 86,692 of their young men, that we and our Imperial allies killed, and the 164,617 we injured, the two present day Anzac leaders are mulling over a rerun in Turkey's neighbour, Iraq. Ironically, we'll have to seek permission from our old foe to mount this invasion from Turkish soil.
A centennial is a good time to learn from past mistakes, not repeat them. In this instance, Mr Key and his woodwork-teacher-turned-Defence Minister, Gerry Brownlee, are proposing just the reverse.
In 1915 we were dragged into the Gallipoli bloodbath as cannon fodder in a battle involving assorted dying empires, including the Ottomans and the British, of which we were the furtherest appendage.
Over nine months, 131,000 young men were killed and another 262,000 wounded - Turks, Arabs, New Zealanders, Australians, Indians, British, Irish, French and even a contingent of Newfoundlanders.
We're now being softened up for a return bout, this time in another part of the old Ottoman Empire. It's almost as crazy as the Germans sending out a "meet you at the Somme" challenge to their foes of 1914-1918.
The Prime Minister says the small 40 to 100-strong New Zealand contingent would be strictly a training force, although he doesn't rule out sending some additional combat force to protect the trainers. But our Australia partners will be there, apparently, to shoot. Not that the enemy will make any distinction. In Iraq and neighbouring Syria, life is very cheap.
The United Nations puts the death toll in Syria since March 2011 at more than 191,000. Next door, 171,000 died in the 2003-2011 Iraq War, and since the US withdrawal, up to 30,000 more have died.
It is into this hellhole that Mr Key wants to insert 100 unarmed "trainers" to mark the Gallipoli anniversary. Yet the bloody lesson of Gallipoli is not to get involved in other people's wars. Not on a freelance basis like this anyway.
In 1945 at the post-World War II conference in San Francisco to create the United Nations Organisation, New Zealand and Australia argued just this point.
We fought for a system of collective security and peacekeeping involving the full membership of the UN. The big powers refused, but that doesn't make the Anzac case wrong. Just before its time.
Recently voted on to the Security Council, New Zealand should be fighting for such a solution to the Iraq problem, not unilaterally barging into some God-forsaken desert with 40 to 100 non-fighting soldiers.
