Question War - If you don't, who will?

The numbers are so large they almost become meaningless. Dollars, deaths, and destruction rush by us in a cacophony of abacus clacks as God's fingers dance across the beads, as Kali bends down multi-armed and flicks us around like little toy soldiers.

It's too easy to go glassy-eyed over the numbers, the metrics of war as Herr Rumsfeld calls them. One jumped out at me the other day, though: 1.8 billion.

Not the visible galaxies in our corner of the universe. Not the nucleotide sequences in our DNA. Not the years since a ball of protein rolled itself into a sac of fat and called itself life.

No. That's 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition now blasted every year into the world by the US military.

Try to imagine it. The stutter of the guns, all those bullets ripping apart the air, the acrid bite of cordite, happiness as a warm gun... So many bullets seeking out the futile resistance of soft flesh that the Masters of War cannot produce them fast enough from the three ammo factories that the US government owns.

Here's another number: 250,000. That's a quarter of a million bullets exploded for every terrorist, insurgent, or guerilla killed in the with-us-or-against-us global war on decency waged by the Bush criminals. If you want the kill efficiency to go up, simply factor in the innocents and civilians who happened to sit, step, sleep or wander into the path of one of the 6 billion bullets the US military set loose in the world since 2002.

But there's a problem. We're running out of ammo. Too many targets, not enough production. Like oil, have we entered the brave new world of peak ammunition?

Not to worry. We turn to a dependable outside vendor, Occupations Are Us, the professionals in Israel, who know the value of a bullet and are more than willing to supply us with what we need: 313 million rounds of 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm, and 50-calibre slugs to make up the shortfall. Thanks fellas, we owe you one. How about Iran? Syria?

The numbers are getting too big, the irony almost more than one can bear. Somewhere a little boy amputates a daddy long legs spider, giggling with joy just to watch us twitch and dance.