For the Byron Echo, May, 2005

The Americans killed twenty thousand Iraqi children in the last thirty months. How many American children did the Iraqis kill? is this a fair question? How can it not be? For it shows pretty simply and swiftly how Iraqis think of Americans, and why so few of them are grateful that Americans came to bomb their country, sack their civil service, burn their libraries, 'privatise' their oil, make toxic their water supplies and tell them how to organise their parliamentary future. The Americans killed, in 2003, twenty thousand of the Iraqis' children. They mutilated, crippled and made ill another thirty thousand of the Iraqis' children. They orphaned, probably, ten thousand of them.

None of these figures is in dispute. Nor is the next one, that not one American child died as a result of Iraqi helicopter-gunship attack, checkpoint shooting or mortar fire on private American suburban houses. No Iraqi soldiers kicked down American families' doors and dragged away American breadwinners to torture in illegal, ill-run prisons condemned by the UN. Until you know this contrast, one clear to every Iraqi, and every teenage boy on 'Arab Street', you cannot know what makes a suicide bomber. If you lost a little brother in a checkpoint killing by an ignorant, coked-up redneck who then evaded punishment, you might become a suicide bomber too.

So saying that 'No Iraqi wants to see again Iraq as it was under Saddam Hussein', which is like saying 'No Iraqi would like his little brother alive again, as he was in the bad Saddam years before the Americans killed him', is to show an almost preposterous lack of human sympathy. And to base a foreign policy on it, as Alexander Downer does, is lunacy. And to have a lunatic foreign policy, one that's already made us half a billion Muslim enemies, is pretty unwise.

No doubt there are some Friends of the War who disagree with this? Are there any, though, prepared to say so in a public forum? Gerard Henderson? Andrew Bolt? Robert Hill? Prepared to say that since our side killed those children in a good cause, though none of our children were lost in it, the fight was worth it, worth the improved Baghdad we see today? And if they aren't prepared to say so in a public forum, what are we to think of them? That they truly believe it? Or that they only say they do? And if they only say they do, how contemptible are they? Twenty thousand of their children, and none of ours. And we are the good guys. Discuss.