Jan. 2005

When did killing tens of thousands of people help any leader or his cause? It didn't help Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot. It didn't gain kudos for the bombers of Dresden or Hiroshima. It didn't make friends for the decimators of East Timor, Rwanda and Tibet. The slaughterers of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Native Americans and the Aborigines won little praise (in the long run) for their exterminations of babies, infants, children, women, old people and fallen warriors in their various crusades.

And yet George Bush, whose Iraq war killed as many children as the tsunami, thinks his firepower has made friends for 'freedom' in the Middle East, and the Iraqis should be grateful for the loss of a hundred thousand of their people (Johns Hopkins University has lately estimated) in the cause of a democracy they have been trained to fear. Though half a million of their siblings are mourning them, and two million cousins and uncles and parents and aunts, and six million neighbours and school friends, George Bush thinks this slaughter helps. A greater number of people died in Iraq in last these two years than died in Hiroshima, in these last fourteen years than died in the American Civil War, and Bush is annoyed at their ingratitude.

Does anyone other than Americans -- and Ariel Sharon, and Osama bin Laden -- think in this way any more? Is there a German in favour of the collateral massacre of children? Is there a Russian? A Briton? A Kosovan?
The tsunami demonstrated what numbers like this mean. A hundred and sixty thousand dead from twenty nations was thought to be far too many. Yet a hundred thousand dead in one country -- called Iraq -- was thought okay. This is a greater number than all the Australian dead in all our wars since 1788 and this roll-call of massacre is called 'minimising civilian casualties' by our Prime Minister, John Howard.

This is why I think -- and I may be wrong about this -- the Arab world hates Americans and Britons and Australians and will be kidnapping, beheading and suicide-bombing them, us, for the next five hundred years. It is not just that in killing thirty thousand Iraqi children we have been heedlessly cruel, but we have also insulted their loved ones' intelligence by demanding that they rejoice at our interruption of their ordinary happiness and the shattering of their ordinary expectations and ordinary hopes with bunker-busters, checkpoint killings, midnight arrests and sexual torture in Abu Ghraib. Is there anything more obvious than this? Probably not. Yet John Howard still says no-one in Iraq would want Saddam Hussein back. If got my dead child back as well, and my bombed house, I would.

Does killing tens of thousands of people help any cause? The Palestinians are lately finding out it doesn't. The Indonesians in Aceh. The Chinese in Tibet. Killing hundreds helped the Irish, the Algerians, the Israelis under the British. But tens of thousands, no. Yet George Bush, the fool, wants applause for his mass killings even after his reason, WMDs, is found to be baseless and his informants corrupt or deluded. He wants applause for holding elections whose death toll outnumbers the Anzacs killed at Gallipoli. He is as foolish as that. And yet we look to him for 'leadership', or John Howard does. Probably no-one else in the world.

It's useful to look at the figures now and then. Every one of those children had a life. And we took it from them. And we want thanks for that. How mad we must look. How mad we probably are.