Another day in Iraq, another batch of corpses...

Did you even hear this story on the news today: Suicide Attacks Kill at Least 48 in Iraq?

Or were the top TV stories still breathlessly talking about the 50+ dead from the London bombings?

Here in Australia, we have had saturation news coverage of the "worst ever terrorist attack on British soil". TV stations ran special two hour editions re-hashing almost meaningless "reporting" from earlier TV news editions. The PM made statements. Prayer vigils were held. In Brisbane, the Premier put the whole police force on High Alert without ever properly explaining why.

Yet we seem to have grown bored with the ongoing conflict in Iraq, even though the weekly body count (when the bodies are counted) is consistenly higher than London's casualties. And don't even talk about Afghanistan - we have completely forgotten it.

This is the real tragedy of Bush's illegal and immoral wars: not that our leaders have lied us into such violence, but that we have so willingly accepted it. The latest news reinforces the fact: for most people in the Western world, a British, American or even Australian life is worth 100 or more Third World lives.

And we wonder why do they hate us?