You might blink and miss it in the media: the mention of what the war in Iraq has done to the soldiers who are now returning. Once again, young men and women will live out the traumas of war in private misery, while the old men who sent them into danger dine out on their political memoirs, or in the case of Blair, proceed to promote their new Christian charity.
As statistics emerge in the newspapers - hundreds of millions of dollars for rehabilitation, disability pensions and compensation - they are accompanied by the personal testimonies of what it is like to have one's life shattered by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury.
TBI is the ‘signature wound' of the Iraq war: it is the result of the brain being rattled against the skull when roadside bombs explode and subsequent catastrophically swelling, which in turn causes memory loss, depression and suicidal impulses. According to official U.S. army statistics, an average five American soldiers attempt or commit suicide every day, because of the appalling long term effects of TBI.
Nothing new here of course.
Shell shocked or mustard gas blinded soldiers emerging from the barbarous trenches of the First World War, cripples of World War Two missing arms or legs dominating the childhoods of my generation, Vietnam vets suffering trauma and depression and a lack of recognition by a reluctant Australian public, the continued misery of the feral child soldiers of Africa - a depressing list of the effects of murderous conflict on surviving combatants.
Not to mention the hideous suffering of the so-called collaterals - in other words the thousands of civilians like you and me, who were killed, maimed or orphaned.
Bush, Blair and Howard were responsible for the lies about Iraq and for unleashing the war. They must be held accountable not only for the ‘butcher‘s bill‘ as Admiral Nelson used to call it , but also for the shattered lives of the injured and traumatised survivors, and the plight of their families.
While it is hard to argue any pristine case for a just war, it was without any doubt folly, self aggrandisement, acquisitiveness and sheer inefficiency that led to the attack on Iraq. In other words: an extreme example of what the Buddha described as the source of all suffering - the mind of ignorance, greed and aggression.
In ancient times the fall-out of the deluded mind was limited because war machines were primitive. Now we have ever more sophisticated weapons, and suicide bombers with their so-called back-yard technology can produce bombs that are able to pierce heavily armoured vehicles.
Umberto Eco, in his brilliant analysis of the first Gulf War*, made a case against contemporary war by pointing out that modern wars no longer have fronts, no longer have rules, no longer have easily identifiable enemies. For that reason traditional equipment, strategy and Geneva convention are all becoming obsolete, and the distinction between regular fighting, war crimes and torture is increasingly blurred.
In the meantime the strategies of Caesar, Clausewitz and Napoleon are still taught at the military academies, but they are quaint relics of very different phases of human aggression.
The image of Bush on the aircraft carrier proclaiming the end of the Iraq war has become a bitter joke. It is a reminder that modern wars are no longer winnable in the old sense. They simply do not stop - once the jinnee is out of the bottle no one can put it back again.
At best, contemporary wars peter out. But they often re-ignite, as they recently threatened to do in the Balkans over Kosovo. In Iraq the war may go on in various guises for decades and long after Bush and the others have retired to their porches in Texas, rural Buckinghamshire or Wollstonecraft, a bleak inheritance for the next generation.
* ‘Reflections on War' in: Five Moral Pieces, Harcourt 2001