November, 2003

Let us imagine a hundred and seventy thousand Tongans and twenty thousand Maoris parachute into Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, bombing with precision rockets and helicopter gunships Government House and John Howard's Kirribilli palace. Let us imagine they kill his sons, display their bloated bodies and put a $40 million reward on his head.

Let us further imagine they burn Mitchell Library and let looters into the National Gallery. Let us imagine they with bombs and helicopter gunships kill three thousand children, mutilate six thousand children, kill twenty thousand outgunned Australian soldiers, shoot young families on station wagons on suspicion, invade Pymble homes forcing women to the floor at gunpoint. Let us moreover imagine they throw three hundred thousand bureaucrats, police and soldiers out of their jobs, leaving them no wages to live on.

Let us imagine in the course of this the electricity goes off and in the dark there is unchallenged burgling and looting of private homes and shops and hospitals. Let us imagine they speak only Maori and Tongan, and make no effort to communicate with us in our language. Let us further imagine that they express their bafflement that we did not welcome them with open arms.

...Well, you can see how things might go hereafter, can't you. Young men with dead brothers forming small groups of armed resistance. Booby traps. Land mines. Sniper fire. A hatred of those Australians now working as police, and paid by the Tongans. An utter contempt for the ruling body of wealthy expatriates -- Robert Hughes, Jodee Rich, Baz Lurman, Germaine Greer -- they set up under the chairmanship of Rene Rivkin. An attempt to kill Germaine Greer on her way to Parliament House.

The word spreading that Howard lives and may, with Blair's help, reinstate himself. Panic, betrayal, more violence, more bombings. Tongan reprisals on whole suburbs. Wolstonecraft in flames. Rumours that the King of Tonga may be pulling out his troops. 'The lives of my soldiers are too precious,' he says, 'to waste civilising scum like John Howard's Australians.' Racism is when you don't, as recommended by the Golden Rule, imagine yourself in the shoes of others, living their lives, enduring their predicaments. Racism is when you trick yourself into thinking another thing is happening and not what really is.

How will Iraq end up? Well, you may well ask. Balkanised, I think, with the Saddamists (and maybe even Saddam himself) running the Ba'ath regions, the Kurds running the Kurd regions, and the Shi'ites, closely allied with Iran, in the southern part. Some UN officials present in all the regions. Some UN peacekeepers. And the US, the UK and the Australians nowhere to be seen. Because you can't rule twenty-six million people with a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers whom no-one wants to be there, and that includes the soldiers themselves. And you can't be re-elected to a US presidency that the US army wants you out of. And the Greens. And the Blacks. And the women. And the unions. And the jobless. And the literate. And the insecure.

So Bush will be out of the White House and Dean, or Gephardt, or Gore, or Hillary Clinton in it, with Wesley Clark as Vice-President, by this time next year. And the US out of Iraq by July. See if I'm wrong.