October, 2005

It looks like it was wrong of Saddam Hussein to kill or approve the killing of 143 people some of whom had tried to kill him, and he should therefore (I suppose) hang by the neck until he is dead for him immoderacy. This seems fair enough. But it also seems by the same measure, or a worse one, wrong of George Bush to kill or approve the killing of one hundred thousand people in Afghanistan because one or two, or ten or twenty of them, tried to kill him and his Congress on 9/11, and he should therefore, what, fry in Old Sparky till his eyes pop and his tongue turns black, for his immoderacy.

Victors' justice is never nice, or just. It wasn't just, or nice, to burn to the water-level Saddam's luxury yacht, an exploitable treasure as tourist-magnetic as Blenheim Palace on which young students could sail upriver to Babylon for the next two hundred years, or to kill his grandson Mustafa who was fourteen and guilty, thus far, of not very much at all. It wasn't just to hire young jobless Kurds to pull down Saddam's statue and dismember it, a work of art as worthwhile in its gargantuan way as Holbein's portrait of that other murderous tyrant Henry VIII. Remove it to a courtyard of the Baghdad museum by all means, or sell it to Phillip Adams. But not dismember it.

It isn't just either to try Saddam under laws of a country that doesn't have a constitution yet, or a constitutionally elected parliament or High Court, a country that therefore doesn't actually exist, when The Hague is there to try such matters in. It isn't just to not let his lawyers see the evidence. And it's problematic to call 'murder' or 'crimes against humanity' what happens in an ongoing civil war. If it's just to do so then Abraham Lincoln was guilty, by the same logic, of four hundred thousand murders. One thing is certain: that 'trying' Saddam, and killing him in this way, will cause the deaths of maybe relatively innocent Shi'ites in the next year or so and an era of Troubles thereafter for Iraq for eighty years or so, long after the Americans' ignominious exit from it in March, 2008.

What the Americans decreed should be done to Idi Amin, a much nastier piece of work, luxury accommodation in Saudi Arabia for him, his many wives and fifty children and an allowance of two million dollars a year, seems less expensive to me than a century of torture and murder, jihad, martyrdom, Gulf War syndrome and terrorist attack; but what would I know. I only predicted Iraq would prove an unwinnable bloodbath and if Saddam had, as George, Colin, Condi and Donald said, launchable atomic bombs in secret desert places he would use them in the first week of the war. And America and Australia would be execrated for a century, perhaps two centuries, for being in those battles, and in that Pyrrhic victory.

I wonder how long it will take our leaders to see that bird flu threatens, by a factor of thousands to one, more innocent lives than terrorism? Decades, probably. And scores more years, or hundreds, before they note that avian influenza is very, very like globalism. Because it respects no borders, and infects, disorders and smashes communities wherever it touches down. It makes nonsense of whole lifetimes of honourable purpose and reasonable precautions. It kills religion, good will, neighbourly good humour and makes foes of old friends.

And what is the cure for this murderous virus globalism? Well, what is happening to bird flu really. You stop at the border unsuitable, threatening products, potentially lethal products, from entering our economy. You exile from our good fellowship those global companies that have hurt, enslaved, impoverished or polluted communities it previously invaded. You treat it like a disease, which it is, and you lock up like lepers its carriers.

How many deaths, how many divorces, how many ruined childhoods and fractured educations does globalism have to cause before we see it, and condemn it, as the pandemic it is? How many miles must those viral geese fly before they are shot from the air? Just asking.