Thoughts on War

with Bob Ellis

The Big Lie exposed

The WMDs George Bush is daily not finding are making him sound, every week, just a little more silly. He said in his regular broadcast on Sunday that Saddam could have destroyed them 'at the start of the war'. In the same way, presumably, as Hitler dismantled and buried his V2 rockets on the morning after D-day, for fear he might be criticised for having them. And be scolded by history for using things that kill people in wartime to defend his country from people invading it. Shame on you, Adolf. Go stand in the corner.

No, Hitler didn't do that. He used what he had till the end including, like Saddam, child volunteers. Dictators fight to keep their power with everything they've got. Saddam is doing that now with suicide bombers. He would have done it with weapons of mass destruction if he'd had them.

Ergo, he didn't have them. And we killed a lot of people although he didn't have them. Killed them because of a lie.

Meantime Iraq's oil is being 'privatised' and Halliburton -- Cheney's company - hired to rebuild the 'infrastructure' Bush bombed for housing WMDs and politically incorrect officials. And the war's true purpose is becoming plainly known. If you knock things down you have to build them again. The fire insurance industry works the same way. It needs, now and then, an arsonist to keep it going. And the US army is that necessary arsonist. And so it goes.

It could be said, then, that the WMDs have served their purpose, like Hitler's Reichstag fire, of supplying a pretext for murdering people and stealing their property. And that part of it is thankfully over. We now move on. We put that all behind us. We pick the next target, and make war elsewhere.

But it's not quite happening that way. It's not panning out the way Paul, Donald and Condaleeza planned.

Put it this way.

Blair can't, now, help Bush invade Iran or Syria and search there for weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons, and neither can Howard. Because Blair is under siege in the Commons, and Howard under Senate investigation, for using that Big Lie once as a pretext for slaughtering children, and they can't use it again. It wouldn't be seemly to cry wolf twice in this way; cry Wolfowitz I guess I mean.

So this much has changed. The Big Lie has become inoperative in a couple of countries and Bush to go into Iran must go in alone, crying WMD! and war on terror! in an election year, while Blair is derided, and perhaps brought down, for using the selfsame words a year before. He might pull it off. But he also mightn't.

And he might lose his job and go on trial as a war criminal for needlessly killing women and children a year or so after that when a Democrat president signs on as a member of the ICC.

The wonder of it all is that weapons of mass destruction were ever an issue. For each of us dies only once and Ruanda showed you can kill eight hundred thousand people with machetes - with two machetes if the queue is long enough. America's helicopter gunships showed it's not how big the weapons are that counts, but where you fire them and how accurately. The tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts, probably, killed in April didn't care much how big a weapon it was that killed them, it was death, however it came, that so rudely interrupted their careers, they resented most of all. A bunker buster was death enough. You try sitting under one.

And America brings death in so many ways. In cigarettes. In fatty foods. In Gulf War Syndrome. In lethal injections. In global warming. In global unemployment that brings on teenage suicide. In AIDS drugs Africans can't afford because their 'intellectual property' is more important than life itself. In support for Sharon's bulldozers and 'targeted assassinations'. In support, thus far, for his two or three hundred H-bombs. In its trade agreements employing and enslaving and depressing people everywhere. In its restoration of the heroine trade in Afghanistan. In slash-and-burn economics that makes worse schools and hospitals everywhere.

You could say, in fact, that the greatest weapon of mass destruction is America itself.

You could say it often.

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