
Share prices are soaring in America for those who produce the coalition bombs and missiles and drones and aircraft participating in this latest war which - for all who are involved (except for the recipients of the bombs and missiles and those they are fighting) - is Hollywood from start to finish.
Shares in Lockheed Martin - maker of the "All for One and One for All" Hellfire missiles - are up 9.3 per cent in the past three months. Raytheon - which has a big Israeli arm - has gone up 3.8 per cent. Northrop Grumman shares swooped up the same 3.8 per cent. And General Dynamics shares have risen 4.3 per cent. Lockheed Martin - which really does steal Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers quotation on its publicity material - makes the rockets carried by the Reaper drones, famous for destroying wedding parties over Afghanistan and Pakistan, and by Iraqi aircraft.
And don't be downhearted. The profits go on soaring. When the Americans decided to extend their bombing into Syria in September - to attack President Assad's enemies scarcely a year after they first proposed to bomb President Assad himself - Raytheon was awarded a $251m (£156m) contract to supply the US navy with more Tomahawk cruise missiles. Agence France-Presse, which does the job that Reuters used to do when it was a real news agency, informed us that on 23rd September, American warships fired 47 Tomahawk missiles. Each one costs about $1.4m. And if we spent as promiscuously on Ebola cures, believe me, there would be no more Ebola.
Let us leave out here the political cost of this conflict. After all, the war against Isis is breeding Isis. For every dead Isis member, we are creating three of four more. And if Isis really is the "apocalyptic", "evil", "end-of-the-world" institution we have been told it is - my words come from the Pentagon and our politicians, of course - then every increase in profits for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics is creating yet more Isis fighters. So every drone or F/A-18 fighter-bomber we send is the carrier of a virus, every missile an Ebola germ for the future of the world. Think about that.















Comment: Rest in peace, Ms. Serena Shim. Thank you for your courageous work.