July, 2004

And so it seems the numbers again were wrong. There were not six hundred thousand bodies in mass graves as Paul Wolfowitz lately asserted, but only four thousand. He made a counting error, it seems. Should it matter that this is so? Should the smaller number make us less willing to charge, try and execute Saddam Hussein? Or is mass murder still mass murder, and a difference of half a million corpses of little account?

Well, it depends. It alters a few things. It means for instance that our side killed more children during Shock and Awe last March and April than Saddam put in his mass graves -- five thousand for us, one thousand for him. More children died under Shock and Awe in fact than all the people, young and old, in mass graves found in Iraq thus far. And this takes no account of the five hundred thousand children Amnesty reckons our side killed with sanctions after 1991, which is more than the total number of children killed in Rwanda. The total number of people, adults and children, killed by US and UN sanctions and US and UK bombardment during Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom is about 1.3 million, a number equivalent to all the Americans killed in all wars after 1776; or, to put it more vividly, a quarter of the Holocaust.

That most Americans expect the Iraqis to be grateful for our ignorant bloodstained interference in their nation is curious, I find. It is common for populations to resent a million of their people being killed, and nine million bereaved. Good intentions do not matter when the numbers are so high.

Should Saddam hang then, and the Bushes, Major, Clinton, Blair and Kofi Annan be acclaimed for their good intentions and greater slaughter? Not really, or not in my view. Amnesty estimates that Saddam killed in his several civil wars and his reprisal against dissidents around thirty-three thousand Iraqis in thirty-four years. Against this thousand-a-year average, our one hundred-thousand-a-year average since 1991 seems hard to justify. For our side outscores a hundredfold a man renowned as the vilest tyrant since Hitler.

Though the blame is mostly shared by three American Presidents, two English Prime Ministers, Madeleine Albright and Kofi Annan, Australia must surely own a fraction of it. Without our involvement, Blair may not have been persuaded to go in. Without the UK's involvement, the US may not have dared go in.

So what should Australia do about this now the cause and the numbers have been proven wrong? An apology for our part in the death of five thousand children might help. The organised adoption of a hundred crippled Iraqi orphans wouldn't hurt. A blanket apology for our lawless destruction of a nation guiltless of secret, malign and offensive weaponry, plus a billion dollar donation wouldn't hurt.

And, of course, the removal of John Howard, who like Edith Piaf regrets nothing. He would kill, he says, those five thousand children again if offered the choice. And he has got us stuck there, for five or fifty years, and we probably can't leave, but he should be punished for getting us there and for putting any Australian travelling in the Middle East in danger of decapitation, torture, kidnapping, or being spat on in the street.

We cannot bring back the dead, we cannot put back the limbs of the tens of thousands lately mutilated by the bombing, and we cannot make Iraq safe, or Gaza safe, or the western world safe ever again. But we can show John Howard how wrong he was, and how silly he was, to wreck so many Australian lives. This at least we can do. If anyone disagrees with this, I will debate him or her anywhere.

© Bob Ellis