By Jo Wilding
May 6th

I’ve moved down the street. This has mainly advantages but one notable disadvantage in that I’m a couple of hundred metres closer to “The Green Zone”, as in “They’re bombing the…” The Green Zone, for those who have never needed to know, is the heavily fortified bit which most of the decision makers and foreign workers in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) never leave because of a theory that it’s somehow more dangerous to be on the streets of Baghdad than walled into the most heavily attacked part of it.

Sure enough, first thing in the morning there was a car bomb just outside it. Another advantage of the new apartment is that there’s a generator right outside my window, powering a roaring air conditioner. The Fourteenth of July Bridge provides access from Abu Nawas Street, across the Tigris, and soldiers manning the checkpoint approach the cars waiting to cross. It seems the soldier came as usual to look in the car before it reached the checkpoint and the driver detonated it, killing himself, the soldier and six other Iraqis.

In Falluja they are still finding bodies, bodies in the rubble of the houses crushed by aerial bombing by the US in Al-Julan, Hay Askeri and Shuhada, bodies buried in gardens, bodies being brought to the football fields turned into cemeteries. There are some very tiny graves. There are people still missing. The 600-deaths estimate put out by most of the media seems on the low side.

If the killings of four US mercenaries were the reason for the attack on Falluja then the ratio is at least 150 Iraqis to one American, maybe 250. From the other side, the Iraqi side, the resistance side, the Iraqi life is worth more. If the killings of eighteen Fallujans shortly before the killings of the mercenaries were the spark for the latter then one American life is worth just four and a half Iraqis, a little less than the six-to-one of the car bombing.

There is, of course, a difference between armed self-defence when your town is being invaded, like Falluja, and setting off bombs in the street but in the end it comes down to this: there has been enough killing. There has been too much killing.