Thoughts on War

with Bob Ellis

No world order

There is enmity between their seed and our seed. We kill the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them.

This curse by Shaw in Heartbreak House is truer now than ever before. So much of the attrition of the good in us occurs each day that we don't much want to think about things any more.

In Iraq, we were told, there were ‘minimum civilian casualties', meaning no more than 3000 children were murdered, 2000 children mutilated and 1000 or 2000 orphaned, and no more than 10 million savagely traumatised. We were told too that ‘stuff happens' when banks were looted of millions of dollars, hospitals trashed and the surviving memory of the cradle of civilisation made rubble and carried away by robbers unthreatened by listlessly watching dogface soldiers, and it's only the first, forgivable exuberance that comes with liberation. This new world order seems more like new world chaos.

Untune that string, Will Shakespeare's Ulysses warned, and hark what discord follows.

For it's not just having no water to drink for a month or two, no hospital care, and no medication for the schizophrenics nightly howling in moonlit rubble like Lear in Act Three. It's not just having no schooling, or not for a year maybe, for kids driven mad by bombing that killed their brothers and uncles in the army and their school friends up the road, nor no electric light to study the books that weren't burned up in the ‘inadvertent' immolation of the schools, bookshops and libraries or looted from them since. It's not just the Shi'ites, unleashed at last, murdering the Sunnis in millennial vendetta and the Sunnis, who still have weapons, fighting back with fatwahs and oaths of hatred honed these thousand years.

It's a good bit more than that.

For Iraq has no money any more, or none of much value, so there's nothing much to buy things with except an exchange of looted goods. And nobody has a real job any more, or not one that has a salary. And though everyone can eat while Food For Oil continues, nobody can buy things any more. They can steal, but not buy them in this Aftertime.

And this is what happens when you firebomb government buildings, cremate official records, let vandals exultantly shred banknotes on public streets and print packs of Wanted cards of high officials lately welcome in downtown Manhattan. Instead of having a formal surrender negotiated by, say, Tariq Aziz and an orderly continuing civilisation of universities and hospitals and jobs and salaries while a new government is put in place you have internecine fury, theocratic pogrom, gangland murder, arson, burglary and, yes, a new generation of Bin Ladens crouched in ruins obsessively stroking a dead pet cat and planning earthly blood and heavenly glory.

And this is why you should have rules to go by, and rules to go to war by, and a UN to judge if you have broken those rules or not. This is why the UN was invented, lest barbarians like Bush and Rumsfeld and, yes, Blair and Straw and Howard and Hill and Downer get their way. Consider the following.

Under US law there is a thing called ‘unlawful killing'; you can't go to gaol for it, but you can be sued for it. OJ Simpson, because of it, had to pay his dead wife's family $13 million. Suppose now a bereaved Iraqi, the father for instance of the two boys targeted and killed while they tried to fix the TV aerial on the roof, sued the helicopter gunship crew that did it for ‘unlawful killing'. Would he win? Why wouldn't he? What would the crew say in their defence?

That it was an understandable accident, we thought the two boys were snipers? No, it was not a legal war, so any killing in it was by definition unlawful. That we were ordered into the war by a demented head of state? No, after Nuremberg this is no defence. Twelve million dollars please. And $42 million, at this rate, for the man who lost seven children at a checkpoint and asked, ‘Which coffin shall I weep on?' And 20,000 plaintiffs more.

Will this case come to court? Well, probably not, while-ever such litigants fear being cluster-bombed in their lawyers' chambers by a foreign juggernaut they feel to be cruel, pre-emptive, trigger-happy and, in most cases, loudly and vulgarly unjust.

And what cases will come to court, and to which court? The case of Tariq Aziz, war criminal, lately a respected orator at the United Nations, an esteemed commentator on BBC, a cultured Chaldean Catholic, guest of the Pope and lover of English novels? And what court will he be tried in? Not in the ICC which America does not recognise. Not in the US Supreme Court which, because the war was illegal, would charge his captor with kidnapping. Where then will he be tried? In a US army kangaroo court in Idaho? Or will he rot like David Hicks in a filthy bamboo cell in Guantanamo Bay till a future administration saying sorry lets him go and gives him a visiting professorship in Middle Eastern studies in Princeton and a column in The New York Times?

Untune that string, and hark what discord follows. And because the UN will not and cannot have any role in the future running of Iraq (lest war crime charges be brought against the US military, and arrests duly made), the US – and the UK, and Australia – will have to pay for a shattered nation's entire rebuilding and, for a year or so, the wages in tens of billions of the civil servants, the policemen, the hospital and university staff and the insurance payouts, probably, for the houses bombed and the treasures burned in the museum. The US and UK and Australian taxpayers will have to foot the bill.

Hark what discord follows. It is to avert this kind of disorder that Hammurabi of Mesopotamia a few miles up the road began the progress of the rule of law and just compensation we live by now.

Or we did till six weeks ago, when justice was deregulated and privatised by the Americans – and us – and three mushroom clouds over Baghdad proclaimed a new order. Moloch was back, and we were his craven disciples.

• Bob Ellis will write weekly on the war for The Echo.