for some balance - another ripper

PHILLIP ADAMS

Britain had this coming

July 12, 2005

IT'S a quiet, ho-hum, run-of-the-mill day in Iraq. Just a few bombs will explode in Baghdad. Only a few dozen will be killed or maimed. Fifty or 60 max. With the victims predominantly locals - only a couple of US soldiers among the casualties - they'll hardly rate a mention. Won't crack it for the Nine Network or ABC news. Perhaps a brief para in tomorrow's broadsheets.

Oh, almost forgot. There'll be about 20 kidnappings today. This has been a big racket in Iraq for a year or more with thousands of locals snatched off the streets. Nothing political about it, nothing religious. Just a grab bag of businesspeople and schoolchildren to be held for ransom. So many children are kidnapped these days that parents are keeping them home.

Will these incidents be reported in the US, Britain and Australia? No, they won't. Not news. Just further symptoms of a totally dysfunctional society. Unless, of course, if one of the kidnapped is one of us. Then all media hell will break lose.

Yes, what happened last week in London was appalling. But it happens every day in Iraq. It has since the coalition of the willing, of which Australia was such a willing member, came thundering in more than two years ago.

Things were crook before but have been far worse since. Pinned down by sanctions, inspections and fly-overs, still licking his wounds from the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's greatest crimes were long behind him. The mass graves were history. But since the coalition? Cemeteries are booming again.

Mind you, you don't read much about the local death toll. The body count for Iraqi troops, let alone Iraqi citizens, is censored. Washington allows us to know -- and then reluctantly -- only that nearly 2000 Americans have died.

Unlike those humdrum bombings in Baghdad, the slaughter in London was big news. And let's be clear about it: the people who died in the subway tunnels
and on the bus were victims of the Iraq war. They died because of Blair's London Bridge, the one he built from the Thames to the Euphrates.

Had he not misled his nation into that murderous folly of an invasion, the people would have walked off the trains instead of being carried off on stretchers. Or had their body parts collected in bags.

Blair's response? The same rhetoric, the same mock-heroics, a renewed commitment to the political and strategic idiocy of George W. Bush. You can hear his spin doctors thinking: "If we play this right, we'll improve in the polls."

You can hear the same thoughts from John Howard's people, who will rely on the new political correctness of conservatism: that it's uncouth to link terrorist attacks in London, Madrid or possibly Sydney with the chaos
unleashed in Iraq. As many in Britain are pointing out, they didn't need some Islamist loonies to focus attention on Blair's sorry role in the Iraq fiasco, that a clear majority have long deplored his duplicities, his
misleadership. His bridge too far. But No.10 still says the same things, day in, year out, as if hoping through Pavlovian repetition to wear down the public.

Ditto here, as our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister try to blur the linkages with Iraq. They stress that Islamists are attacking our values, our way of life, our love of freedom in these murderous stunts.

And everyone, most of all Howard and Alexander Downer, knows this is twaddle. The selection of targets is largely based on involvement in, and enthusiasm for, Bush's new world order. The PM tells the truth when he says he cannot promise that our cities are safe from terrorism. He tells the truth when he confirms that an attack on Australia within Australia is not only possible but probable. But he lies when he denies that it is his
foreign policies that have made our lives more dangerous.

The great divide between those who supported the invasion of Iraq and those of us who opposed it is as wide as ever. We seem to live in different universes, with both sides using the London bombings to support their positions.

The pro-war forces in politics and the media look at the mayhem and say: "Told you so." The critics of the war and the way it was conflated with the war on terror say: "Told you so", too.

They say the latest brutalities prove their case, that the Iraq war had to be fought to light the flame of democracy in the Middle East and that our efforts must be renewed. We say that what's happening in Baghdad and now London is inevitable, that the invasion has not liberated democratic forces but detonated more hatred, much of it directed against US hegemony and hubris.

And against those countries, such as Britain and Australia who rushed to Washington's colours. But Howard can't see it. He can't afford to.