July, 2004

When did it last prove useful to kill tens of thousands of people? Or, to ask the question more precisely, when did it last prove useful to kill tens of thousands of innocent people, including eight thousand children, as our side did in Iraq? Well, you have to go back a fair way to find the answer. The four or five million innocents we killed in World War II freed a couple of hundred million other innocents from Hitler's and Tojo's unacceptable tyranny. But they also delivered a billion more to Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-Sung, so the numbers aren't all that flash.

In other wars they're even less so. The three million innocents our side killed in Vietnam, half a million of them children, were useless to our cause in the end. The Communists won, and the hundred and twenty thousand Allied dead from battle, suicide or Agent Orange were wasted lives. The two hundred thousand Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War (and the million dead from sanctions, half a million of them children, in its aftermath) gave two million Kuwaitis back to a corrupt, undemocratic, adulteress-beheading absolute monarchy. The million Chinese we killed in Korea, in a war we lost, helped keep a billion Chinese (a billion and a half if you add in their parents and grandparents) Communist to this day. The two million Germans we killed in World War I, for a cause no-one now remembers, bestirred the rise of Hitler and thirty-two million more deaths in the war he started in revenge.

This is not to say some killing isn't useful. Had Hitler been killed in 1944 and Rommel sued for peace two million lives would have been saved. Had Kruschev killed and replaced Stalin in, say, 1936, eighteen million fewer Russians would have died of torture and starvation in the camps. And had a few hundred of their security men been killed while the good guys were getting to them, well, fair enough. But twenty thousand innocent civilians, five thousand of them children? That's when it stops adding up.

To remove Saddam, America killed (with UN assistance, and ours, and Britain's, and Spain's) about a million Iraqis, three times as many as the highest estimate of the number Saddam killed, and twenty times the probable figure. These million our side killed had about five million siblings and about twenty million aunts, uncles and cousins. This adds up to the whole population of Iraq.
And this is why the Americans are not welcome there. The numbers they killed have a kind of critical mass, which all the good they then may do will not outweigh.

So killing tens of thousands of people for any cause at all is not, as a rule, worth doing. Iraq shows this every day. Killing a few hundred for a good cause, as we did in East Timor, is, on the other hand, probably not a bad idea. We have good friends in East Timor now and though Indonesia dislikes us, good-mannered relations are still possible with its leaders. If we had killed fifty thousand Indonesians, and twenty thousand East Timorese in the crossfire, this would not be so.

That no-one in America has ever proposed this simple arithmetic as a theory is a measure of how stupid their military men are. They think a million deaths won't worry the Iraqis, or four hundred thousand breadwinners flung out of their jobs, or half a million homes burgled, or bad water children die of, or hellish treatment in Abu Ghraib, so long as 'freedom', whatever that is, is part of the package.

They don't understand that Iraqis have big families and like the Kennedys they mourn with vigour each dead son. They don't understand that each dead son has four, or ten, avenging brothers and male cousins. They don't understand he has a mother who fears losing more sons and therefore doesn't greet with flowers and champagne Americans arriving in their tanks, Americans who may have killed him. Americans don't get these things. They don't understand the idea of human cost, and grief, and revenge. Americans can't add up, in the end. And we are supposed to follow them wherever they go, and not 'cherry-pick' what they do as right or wrong. Why? We lost five hundred young men in Vietnam this way, and probably five thousand more to Agent Orange, because we went all the way with America into the usual American bloody mess. Let's not do it again.

Troops home by Christmas? Let's ask some troops, and their wives and children, and their role models in the RSL, and see if they agree. Few, I think, will prefer that their heads come home in cardboard boxes, and then, in other cardboard boxes, their torsos. Let's see if they agree. And let's look the next time we're asked for a lot of death at the numbers, the simple arithmetic, and apply some common sense.

© Bob Ellis