No one doubts that the death of some 3,000 civilians in the September 11 attacks was devastating and tragic. The event scarred people globally and left behind an agonising emptiness for the loved ones of all those who perished.

But seven years on Australia’s complicity with disproportionate revenge has resulted in the slaying of no less than 400 Iraqi civilians, including countless children, for every one person killed on September 11. In other words, the civilian death toll in Iraq is the equivalent of 400 World Trade Centre attacks.

Whatever happened to Australia having not just acceptable, but respected, standards, Mr Smith? Australia once had some international respect as a country that did the right thing, but are we not now seen as doing no more than lip service to morality? To reason? To common sense? To the insistence on basic freedoms? To human and economic fairness?

When the children of future generations learn about the injustices, the inhumanity and in all likelihood the criminality of the “war against terror” they will ask who spoke out and who remained complicit by their silence.

I, like many, if not most Australians, want it on the record that the “war” in Iraq was not in my name; that the “war” in Afghanistan is not in my name; and that the killing of well over a million fellow human beings is a cross that the Howard Government must bear, as must the Rudd Government and yourself if you fail to act.

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