They are home grown and taught by Americans, and us, how to fight with imported weaponry.Some were tortured in Abu Ghraib; many were sacked, outlawed, and persecuted by Jerry Bremer and Nouri al-Maliki; many saw brothers, cousins, gassed by Assad. They have lived through Shock and Awe, and Surge, the Phased Withdrawal. They have seen the corrupt, incompetent Maliki military thieving billions owed to bureaucrats and soldiers.

It is worth asking too if the Americans, who killed 40,000 of their children, where the current Malakite ‘coalition’ killed 15,000 more of their children (my estimate), and 20,000 more of their women, and, in war and peace, 60,000 of their young men – more than all the Australian dead in World War I – will be welcomed back as allies and saviours.And if Australians, who look like Americans, will be welcomed also.

The Baghdadis well knew their middle class jobs and pensions, under Bremer, would be gone soon, and their mortgages would not be paid and they would be out on the streets fighting other beggars for shelter in cardboard boxes. And that, under Maliki, neighbourhoods of Sunnis would be slaughtered, and their mosques burned.

They could see the future and the Americans could not.

The same people can see the future, now, too, and the same Americans cannot. Neither can Tony Abbott, who believed, with Howard, the WMD would soon be found, beneath a sandhill somewhere, and all would be well.

He’s as big a lunatic as that.