July, 2004

Nothing much the Bush administration claims is believed much any more. That we're in a war on terror and its current battlefield is Iraq whose former dictator's WMDs were launchable in forty-five minutes and freely available to al-Qaeda? No, no, no, no and no. That Uday had a human shredder? Well no, it seems not. That his weapons were never used and they were buried somewhere? Nup, can't seem to find them. That after May Day there was no more torture in Abu Ghraib? Well only a little. That making a blindfolded naked man believe he was drowning isn't, technically, torture, or keeping him awake for seventy two hours? No, sorry, it's torture; sorry about that.

That Iraq's people saw the giant advancing tanks of the invader as a welcome liberating force? No; if they did there would be film and photos like in Paris 1944 of women hugging and kissing American soldiers or greeting them in a cheerful, friendly manner, offering them flowers and figs and champagne, and there are none. There would have been women and children cheering round the dictator's fallen statue and there were none. Most Iraqi women we see are cowering on the floor under American guns.

The Control Room, a film about al-Jazeera, shows in fact the forty or fifty young men who frolicked round the Saddam statue weren't Iraqis but, to judge by their accents, Kurds bused in from the north and given American permission to loot. The many, many Baghdad Iraqis living round the square stayed in their bedrooms fearing that if they came out, or if they came out frowning or cursing they'd be killed.

That the war was over on May Day? No; it continues, brutally. That it's being won? Not really. Seven times as many Americans died in Iraq after May Day as before The numbers pretty much tell it all. Ten thousand Iraqis have been killed since May Day by Coalition forces; fewer Anzacs died at Gallipoli. Ten thousand Iraqi civilians -- including five thousand children -- died in March and April last year; more than died in the four years of the London Blitz.

Either forty thousand or twenty thousand Iraqi soldiers died in March and April last year. Four hundred Iraqis lost their jobs in April and May; as many lost their pensions. This is the equivalent, when you add in dependant children, of a city the size of Sydney unemployed or impoverished overnight. A hundred thousand Iraqis were arrested, imprisoned, tortured (probably) and released. Maybe half a million houses were burgled, everything valuable gone in the night. Maybe fifty thousand officers stripped of their computers and records. Maybe five thousand Iraqis died in surgery for want of electricity. An unknown number of houses and flats were bombed.

So if each Iraqi family has six or seven children we must assume that, allowing for overlaps, the American arrival traumatised ten or twelve million Iraqi people. This is half the population of Iraq. Eighty-eight deaths in Bali traumatised Australia. That was 0.02 percent of the population. Fifteen hundred deaths on the Titanic traumatised Great Britain. That was 0.05 percent of the population. Twenty-one hundred Americans dead on 9/11 (the rest were foreigners) traumatised America. That was 0.012 percent of the population.

Directly traumatising with death, burglary, sabotage, home invasion, unjust arrest and shameful torment in prison half the population therefore, and bullying with fear and sorrow the other half -- each dead baby's eighty-four cousins, for instance, and his thirty aunties and uncles -- is no way to make friends in the Arab world, where family honour remains important, and a regular income is thought a useful thing. Nor is killing a million people with sanctions, half of them children, in the last ten years, if that is the accurate figure; a lot of experts think it is. A million is the population of Adelaide, and a greater number than all the deaths in the American Civil War.

Nor is killing families at checkpoints, or rocket-bombing their houses at midnight in Fallujah. Nor is shooting up wedding parties in the middle of their lively hopeful celebrations. Nor is calling the TV stations that show the bodies of wedding guests and a rock band purveyors of untruth, unscrupulous liars who smear false blood on child actors and coach them in what to shriek at the cameras.

Yet Americans do all this and are surprised so few Iraqis are their friends; surprised as well, I suppose, they can't go there safely as tourists any more, as they did to Paris after another war; surprised that the biggest protective juggernaut in world history must now accompany their leader George Bush everywhere because so many people everywhere want to kill him. Americans are constantly, touchingly surprised that if you kill people their families take it badly and want to kill you, and tear down all you stand for. I guess they think that people ought to be better than that.

It's odd, really odd, but Americans alone among Western peoples believe they're licensed to kill like 007 and pretty well infallible; and the twenty-three million Iraqis they haven't killed yet should be grateful they invaded them, subjugated and smashed their cities, abolished their jobs, privatised their health care, tripled their rents, bombed their electricity, fouled their water and let looters and thugs rough up their most holy places; behaving like King Kong in New York, beating his chest on the top of the Empire State Building amazed New Yorkers were so touchy.

Where this foolishness comes from is hard to say. It may be America's muscular Christo-fascist religions, now at war with Osama's muscular Islamo-fascist religion; or the American comic books that George Bush read as a teenager, where villains were Semitic, leering, evil and wanted to blow up the world. It's a pity, but it looks now as if we've made a billion enemies who might have been useful friends --- or courteous trading partners --- by being friends of America, and the damage won't be undone for about three hundred years, and a lot of our children will die in consequence.

If it's anti-American to say this I'm sorry -- and anti-American of course; and of course I am, how can I not be. But those who do not say it, and do not say it soon, will eventually be the laughing stocks, the rubes and suckers and worse, the Lord Haw Haws of these modern times. Or even worse, the Gerard Hendersons

© Bob Ellis