August, 2004

John Howard's confident, bland assertion that Iraq is 'better off' without Saddam needs to be carefully looked at. The five thousand Iraqi children killed by Shock and Awe are not better off. Neither, without them, are their thirty thousand close relatives. Nor are the two hundred thousand close relatives of the thirty, forty or fifty thousand adults killed in the invasion. Nor are the sixty thousand adults and children mutilated -- probably -- and their relatives. Or the four hundred thousand soldiers and civil servants put out of work, or their families. And since these victims of war outnumber, probably, the victims of Saddam, how can Iraq be better off?

Mr Howard says he 'doesn't regret for a minute' going to war, which means dead children mean little to him; or shattered lives, burnt libraries or trashed and looted museums. He thinks Iraq is 'better off' without these things and that is that. He can't be reached on these matters, and unlike most other human beings thinks little of them. The voters will judge him, he says, and maybe this is fair. He is what he is, and the Devil take his detractors.

What worries me most, however, is what he will do is Allawi asks him for five thousand more Australian troops. He will send them, I am sure. He will send them after the election, but he will send them. And one of them will be seized, and brandished, and threatened, and then decapitated and he will not flinch. And then another. And a hundred or so will be killed in battle, and he will not flinch. And ten thousand more Iraqis will be killed, by us and our enemies. And a thousand more Palestinians in Gaza and five hundred Israeli Jews in Tel Aviv and Hebron and Ramullah. And the world will get worse and worse, and he will be proud of it.

Some would call this leadership, which is always in fact insensitivity, a quality dependent, C.P. Snow says, on a 'certain chill in the heart of the leader'. But I would call it lunacy; or, more precisely, psychopathic sycophancy. Whatever the bully George Bush wants, he gets from us, even the beheaded bodies of our sons. For it was a war we had no business being in. It killed more people than it saved. It was lawless, foolishly managed, and made us more enemies than friends. It endangered our citizens everywhere in the world. And only a psychopath would have no regrets about that. Only a John Howard wouldn't, sincerely, have regrets. The chill at the heart of leadership? The lunacy.

© Bob Ellis