For The Byron Echo, March 6, 2005

Murdoch headlines of the last month -- PM Doubles Troops to Iraq; PM Warns Against Another Hike; Drop Out And Get A Trade: PM -- suggest the word 'Howard' has become repellent. The substitute headlines, Howard Doubles Troops to Iraq, Howard Warns Against Another Hike and Drop Out And Get A Trade: Howard, show how unattractive, electorally, this George Costanza of politics, this shifty, backward shuffling grey numbat now seems to even his supporters, and even those Liberals Bob Menzies converted fifty years ago. Has his 'tilting point' come? I think so. When the headline Howard Promises Endless War And Soaring Mortgages has no upside, mortality is near.

When Crean's name grew into box-office poison and his wearisome, whingeing snide cadences became a radio turn-off whatever the listeners' politics, his days on Death Row were numbered. Howard is a more skilful performer (witness the way he leapfrogs full stops and won't stop talking), but his tendency to lie to you even about the weather is now apparent and must surely -- or do I mean 'might possibly'? -- even if the wuss Costello does not wield the cutlery, bring him down.
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A Question Without Notice

A question without notice to the Prime Minister. Will you condemn the checkpoint killing of the hero Nicola Calipari who rescued ? Will you ask George Bush to pay the dead man's relatives damages? Will you deplore the US army's shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to 'liberating' Iraq? Do you not have the ticker to oppose George Bush on anything? Do you show ticker only by pushing helpless refugees back out to sea, and putting blameless families in prison indefinitely? Is this leadership, or is it followership? What is it, you craven little fool?

The checkpoint shooting brings, like most things, America's 'intelligence' into question. Giuliana Sgrena's Italian relatives were already celebrating on television. The car had already driven -- slowly -- through a number of checkpoints unstrafed. Any alert army officer would have let all checkpoint soldiers know the number plate of her rescuers' car. This did not happen and a hero died, as a whole wedding died in May last year and one hundred thousand civilians died because of WMDs that were not there.

American 'intelligence', too, let loose twenty-three Bin Ladens on 9/16, not asking if they knew where their brother way, or might be, an act pretty close to treason. And its procedures in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made a billion enemies worldwide and no friends, not even in the White House. If it's intelligent to protect America by alienating a billion Muslim's, ten million of them likely suicide bombers with passports and US visas, please tell me why.

It also failed for six months to locate Saddam while bombing many places where he wasn't, and this week denied it was planning to kill Chavez, righteously asserting it didn't do that sort of thing. Uday, Qusay, Gaddafi, General Schneider and Hugh Gaitskell would disagree if they were alive, and so, before he was poisoned, would Yasser Arafat, whose murder Murdoch's grisly puppets Fox News called for throughout 2004.

The 20,000 Iraqi children our side killed in 2003 and the 500,000 children we killed with Desert Storm and sanctions after 1990 are greater in number than the number of children killed in Rwanda. Yet we think they will be grateful that we came. That 520,000 dead children do not matter and 'freedom' does.

When you add to that the 600,000 Iraqi adults our side killed since 1990, and the 300,000 we wounded, blinded, crippled, and when you add up the number of siblings, six or seven each on average, and the number of cousins, seventy or eighty, and the number of aunts and uncles, twenty-five or thirty, you will find that everyone in Iraq has reason, good reason, to hate our side. Minus, I suppose, two million Kurds and some grateful Shi'ites; 22 million people, say, the population of Australia, hate our side with reason. And yet we believe we will solve our problems there by killing more of them -- by rooting out and killing the 'insurgents' and so enraging their relatives too. If this is not policy madness, I beg someone to tell me why it is sane, and how it will make us friends in the Middle East.

I had a sister once, and she was killed by a fool in a souped-up car and I think of her every day. If that fool in that car had told me it was a 'regrettable accident' but when I saw the bigger picture I would be grateful he had intervened in my life, I would not have believed him, and I would not have liked him, and I would not have thanked him, and I would I think have tried to kill him or at least do him damage. Every bereaved Iraqi thinks in this way. And there are more of them every day. If this is not policy madness, pray tell me how it is sane.