Sept. 04

That Iraq is a safer place since the fall and capture of Saddam. That Iraq is the principal battlefield of the War on Terror, a war we are currently winning. That killing five thousand children with stray bombs and bullets is 'minimising civilian casualties'. That Spain and the Philippines are in greater danger of terrorist atrocity now that they've pulled, in fear, their soldiers out of Iraq. That what is happening in Iraq is a stirring example of democracy in action that will soon convert the Middle East to the Western way of life. That bulldozing innocent widows' houses and shooting boys who throw stones at tanks are evidence of a true democracy in action. That Iraq is in no way comparable with Vietnam. That the Beslan siege and massacre proves the only way to negotiate with terrorists is to bomb and shoot them until all of them are dead or have changed their minds.

Yes, well, I believe you; thousands wouldn't. It is for big stupid lies like these that America -- and, alas, Australia -- are despised throughout the Islamic world. The biggest lie, that the million Iraqis we have killed with bombs and sanctions and two wars do not trouble their six million siblings, and their nineteen million cousins, who gladly welcome our presence there and regard the burglary, the dark nights, the poisoned water, the blazing oil pipe lines, the six hundred thousand lost jobs and the daily deaths of six or eight Iraqi policemen as necessary steps on the road to a glad new tomorrow, is Orwellian in its enormity and stupid enough to make the Arab peoples loathe and despise us for another thousand years.

And, yes, terrorise us. No Australian businessman travelling in the Middle East is entirely from kidnapping and beheading now, and no Australian primary school or TAFE or convention centre will be absolutely safe from siege and massacre, ever again. These are things we'd better get used to, I think. But I wonder why we keep on lying about them.

Why did our Prime Minister say this week that the Beslan massacre of children shows how evil 'terrorists' are, as if terrorists were a tribe or a political party rather than merely warriors prepared to die -- like Samson -- for a particular cause, this one a war for Chechnyan independence that has cost thus far a quarter of a million Chechnyan lives, twice as many as all the Australians dead in all our wars since 1788? Why did Alexander Downer, that flapping mediocrity, say last week that 'no-one could deny the world is a safer place since the fall of Saddam Hussein'? It is not safer in Beslan. It is not safer in Kabul, or Fallujah, or Sadr City, or the Gaza Strip, or on any European airline touching down in Russia. It is not safer in any part of the Middle East for any young Australian travelling there. Why tell a lie as big as that?

I guess it's because for such people, willing pawns in America's great games of greed, words have no objective meaning any more. They are only things you say, like passwords, that get you to the next stage of the great game. The weapons of mass destruction. The human shredder. The welcoming Iraqi multitudes as the tanks rolled in. The few bad apples that did the torturing in Abu Ghraib. The fair trial David Hicks would get with a court stacked with his enemies.

That's all in the past now, Alexander says, we're in Iraq now, and we have to deal with the new reality on the ground. The game has moved on, and it's at a different stage now. It got to that stage by lying, but that's all in the past. We must move on. We should not look back.

How vile and loathsome the Arab peoples think we are, cowering behind words we do not believe and killing their people indiscriminately. The lying infidels, they call us. The scum of the earth. And, you know, they could be right.