October, 2003

Paul Wolfowitz was nearly killed on Sunday, and gave a brief press conference. We should not give up, he asserted. We should continue supporting those Iraqis who are killing those Iraqis who are bad people, in freedom's name. Kill them without trial. In freedom's name. In this he shows himself to be so far off the planet (he was admittedly a little shaken) that he probably qualifies as an alien. Let me remind him of human nature.

People who kill their fellow citizens annoy their relatives. Iraqis, whose families run to seven and eight, have a hundred and fifty siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts. Kill one of them and you arouse the gene pool. Kill a hundred and fifty of them and you arouse ten thousand more. This is kindergarten arithmetic that is not, however, taught at the Pentagon, apparently. There they still believe you solve old problems by killing lots of people. In Gaza, in Belfast, in Kosovo, in Chechnya, Rwanda and East Timor this proves not to be so. The opposite happens. Killing people creates more problems than it solves. Revenge killings follow, and traditions of revenge, and decades, sometimes centuries, of civil war.

What is worrying about Wolfowitz is that he can't see that people are linked, that no man is an island, that we are all part of one another, that we are all of us kin. That seven siblings in the one Iraqi family might contain an educated feminist translator, an English literature teacher, a Ba'ath party official, an army lieutenant, a bureaucrat third class and a nurse. And if you kill one of them and put two others out of work and bomb the house of another you lose the affection and the respect of all of them. Why is that so hard to understand? Why, moreover, is it so hard to understand that if you don't understand it people everywhere will think you dangerously stupid?

Americans like him burned villages in Vietnam, 'relocated' their populations, cut off the ears of the young men they had killed, napalmed little girls, Agent Oranged the ecosystem, and hoped thereby to win the people's hearts and minds. They caused two million deaths and four million, probably, mutant births, and believed they had behaved appropriately, trying to save Vietnam...from becoming the Vietnam it now is. It doubtless seemed like a good idea at the time. Why are they so bad at connecting cause and effect? It's a puzzle.

In Wolfowitz's mind the changes the Coalition brings to Iraq will be so popular that the whole Arab region will spontaneously embrace and adopt them -- shooting Ba'athists, looting museums, burning libraries, tearing down statues, trashing palaces and 'privatising' their oil with the help of kindly Halliburton -- and prosperous peace and happiness will reign in the region. The lion will lay down with the lamb and Ariel Sharon, even, stop killing people for a week or two. So popular and winning will be what's happened in Iraq that everyone else will want some too.

What a dill he is. For what's happened in Iraq is sixty thousand people now dead (this includes young soldiers) who were alive in February. Two hundred thousand dead (this includes young soldiers) in the war of 1991. Six hundred thousand, mostly children, killed by the sanctions and the spent uranium tubes in the years between. A million mutilated or made chronically sick by now. A half million put out of work. No-one much very grateful that these things happened. No-one much very keen to kiss an American dogface in the street, as you do with liberators. If any Iraqi woman had kissed an American dogface in this way there'd be a photo, and I haven't seen it.

Yet Wolfowitz says we are winning, and things are improving and freedom will prevail so long as we kill enough of the baddies, and offer Hershey bars to their relatives. And he can't work out why people are shooting rockets at him.