The strait of human life: When oil matters more than children

When war is measured in barrels instead of bodies, our moral priorities have gone badly astray, writes Gerry Georgatos.

THE WAR AGAINST Iran has been translated to the world largely through the language of economics.

We are told what is happening to oil prices, shipping routes, insurance premiums, inflation, plastics, manufacturing and the cost of living. Maps of the Strait of Hormuz appear on our screens. Analysts explain the significance of the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Economists calculate how many barrels of oil can pass through one maritime corridor and how much more motorists may pay at the bowser.

But where are the children?

Where are the names and faces of those buried beneath pulverised homes? Where are the children whose limbs have been amputated, whose schools have become graves and whose minds will carry the thunder of bombs long after financial markets have recovered?

What have we become when a barrel of oil receives more sustained media attention than a child’s body?

Black gold, dirty power: How oil still rules the world

Oil has shaped wars, toppled governments and warped global power for over a century — and its grip is only growing more dangerous as the world struggles to break free.

The Strait of Hormuz is unquestionably important. In peacetime, approximately one-fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas passed through it. Its disruption has serious consequences, particularly for poor households already struggling with food, electricity and transport costs. But economic consequences should be reported as consequences of war and not as its principal tragedy.

The principal tragedy is that human beings are killing human beings. The war began with the surprise United States–Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February 2026 and has since widened through attacks and reprisals involving Iran, the United States, Israel, Gulf states and armed forces elsewhere in the region. No government and no armed group should be excused for attacking civilians, civilian shipping or the infrastructure upon which ordinary people depend.

Iranian attacks must be scrutinised. So must American, Israeli and allied attacks. Human life does not acquire or lose value according to the flag flying above the weapon that destroys it.

Within the first days, UNICEF reported that approximately 180 children had been killed in Iran. Among them were reportedly 168 girls killed when the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab was struck while classes were in session. They were mostly children between seven and 12 years old.

One hundred and sixty-eight girls. Do not hurry past that number.

Imagine the school photographs. Imagine the unfinished handwriting in their exercise books. Imagine parents waiting outside hospitals, searching lists, calling phones that will never again be answered. Imagine 168 beds that remained empty that night.

Within ten days of the regional escalation, more than 1,100 children had reportedly been killed or injured across the affected countries. Yet the dominant public narrative soon returned to oil, gas, tanker movements, global supply chains and consumer prices.

The Iran nuclear lie and the warning signs Australia must not ignore

A striking Banksy, a recycled war lie and a drift toward exceptionalism reveal how easily truth is buried — and how urgently Australia must choose to see before stepping over the edge.

The media did not invent those concerns. Governments, markets and audiences demand them. But journalism makes moral choices through repetition and proportion. Whatever it places at the beginning of every bulletin becomes what society is taught to fear most. If the price of petrol leads while the deaths of children become a paragraph beneath it, we are not merely describing an ordering of facts. We are manufacturing an ordering of human value.

This is not new.

In 2003, the United States, Britain, Australia and their partners invaded Iraq as the self-described “coalition of the willing”. I have long called it the coalition of the killing. The world was repeatedly warned about weapons of mass destruction that were not found. Governments promoted certainty where none existed and much of the established media transmitted the claims of power more diligently than it interrogated them.

Iraq was not simply invaded. A society was broken apart. Its schools, hospitals, water systems, homes, institutions and cultural inheritance were devastated by invasion, occupation, insurgency and sectarian violence. The destruction continued long after television networks withdrew their correspondents and found another war.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than 940,000 people were killed directly in the major post-9/11 war zones, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. More than 432,000 were civilians. These figures do not encompass the full multitude who died indirectly because health systems, livelihoods, water supplies and communities were destroyed.

Those human beings cannot be compressed into the sterile expression “collateral damage”. They had names. They were loved. They were expected home.

The same moral evasions followed Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Military campaigns were announced with the polished vocabulary of necessity: precision strikes, strategic targets, degradation of capacity, stabilisation and unavoidable losses. But there is no precision in the life of a child who watches a parent disappear in fire. There is no stability in a household scattered across borders. There is no clinical terminology capable of cleansing war of blood.

Epic Fury, strategic failure: America’s Iran debacle

America’s assault on Iran has exposed the limits of U.S. military power, drained its defences and strengthened the very forces Washington sought to weaken.

This does not mean romanticising the Iranian state, overlooking repression, or excusing violence committed by Iran or forces aligned with it. It does not require a conspiracy theory. The truth before us is terrible enough.

It requires only one consistent principle: no state has a superior entitlement to kill civilians. No child is more deserving of life because that child was born in Perth, London or Washington rather than Tehran, Minab, Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus, Sana’a or Gaza. International law cannot be a weapon used against adversaries and a decorative restraint when allies are responsible.

The economic framing contains another bitter contradiction. We are warned that diminished oil and gas supplies may reduce production, disrupt petrochemicals and make plastic products more expensive. Yet humanity is already drowning in plastic and microplastics. Oil dependence is accelerating climate devastation. Perhaps the interruption of fossil-fuel abundance should provoke an urgent transition — not another war to secure the continued movement of hydrocarbons.

Imagine if the immense expenditure devoted to missiles, aircraft, drones and interception systems were instead committed to renewable energy, hospitals, schools, water security and the alleviation of poverty. Imagine if our first question were not, “How quickly can the oil flow resume?” but, “How quickly can the bombing stop?”

When politicians say that military action is required to protect “our way of life”, we should ask what kind of life is being protected. A way of life centred upon continuous consumption cannot morally outweigh the right of another person simply to remain alive.

I have spent much of my life beside people in their worst hours: families shattered by suicide, children damaged by institutions, people imprisoned, impoverished, displaced or abandoned. Parkinson’s disease now contests my body every day. It has slowed my movement and impaired my speech, but it has not silenced my belief that every human being matters.

Waning world order: Ethics in the age of great power politics

A structured, ethical approach to de-escalation of the U.S.-Israel-Iran War with a pathway toward sustainable peace is needed.

Indeed, illness has sharpened that belief. When the body becomes difficult, life does not become less valuable. When communication falters, the person does not disappear. And when a child lives beneath a different flag, speaks another language or prays within another faith, that child does not become expendable.

Sometimes, watching governments repeat the barbarism of previous generations, I despair of “the human race”. We have developed machines capable of seeing across continents and weapons capable of killing from them, but we have not developed the moral courage to place human life above national vanity, military dominance and commercial convenience.

We now speak anxiously about artificial intelligence acquiring too much control. I am more immediately frightened by the lethal impulses already controlling human beings. If artificial intelligence is to serve humanity, let it help us expose propaganda, document civilian suffering and interrupt the machinery of dehumanisation and not accelerate warfare or automate the decision to kill.

The media must also choose what it wishes to be. It can remain the stenographer of power and the hourly commentator on markets. Or it can recover its moral purpose: bearing witness, questioning official claims, naming the dead and reminding distant audiences that beneath every geopolitical diagram are human beings.

Report the Strait of Hormuz. Report the Red Sea. Report inflation and the cost of living. But never report these matters as though they are more important than the cost of dying.

Lead every bulletin with the children. Then, with the mothers and fathers, with the infirm and old.

Ask who authorised the strike. Ask what was known about the school, hospital or neighbourhood. Ask who will be held accountable. Return the next day and the day after that. Do not permit governments to bury human beings twice; first beneath rubble and then beneath silence.

The measure of civilisation is not whether oil continues to flow. It is whether children are permitted to live.