Everybody would like to win the lottery. Everybody would like their own plasma TV. Everybody would like to pay less taxes, banking fees and bills. Everybody would like to hang-up on direct marketers calling late in the evening.

Everybody would like bulk billing at their doctors. Everybody would like to see a little less of Steve Liebmann, Eddy Maguire, Shane Warne and Kylie’s bum. Everybody would like the drought to end.

Everybody would like cheaper fuel. Everybody would like to shed that extra tyre around the belly. Everybody would like less dog doo in their parks. Everybody would like peace in the world. Or would they?

Would everybody welcome the probably public injection of death juice into the world’s most wanted man (no, the other one), Osama bin Laden?

“I think everybody would,” a gratingly grinning Prime Minister John Howard told the American Fox Network’s Neil Cavuto last Friday week. Howard insists his call was not one for the reinstatement of capital punishment in Australia, but one of respecting United States law and the ‘war on terror’. Perhaps that’s why David Hicks is left to chill out and rot in Guantanamo Bay.

But did Howard have to appear so cheery when answering the question on welcoming bin Laden’s execution? Why couldn’t he just wear his normal uncomfortable constipated expression?

Amrozi, one of the Bali bombing suspects who may face the death penalty, also had a smile on his dial when interviewed by Indonesian police last year. During the interview, he reportedly pointed at Western journalists, remarking, “Those are the sorts of people that I wanted to kill,” cracking up a roomful of Indonesian police. Funny har-har.

Talk of death accompanied with smiling and laughter has never been a good look. As Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “There’s daggers in men’s smiles; the near in blood, the nearer bloody.”

So when Amrozi appeared gleeful in the face of the Bali attacks, many Australians didn’t warm to the body language, with talkback and letters to the editors clogged up with outrage over flashing ones pearly whites. Some even argued the images of Amrozi smiling shouldn’t have been published out of respect to victim’s families.

But when Iron John grins about executing someone – however evil – is it more acceptable if he’s supposedly on the good side of the good versus evil new world?

When comforting a Bali victim, the Deputy Sheriff was reported to have said, “We’ll get the bastards who did this.”

Not surprisingly, Mini-Me’s tough talking response to Bali was similar to that of the World’s Policeman George W. Bush, post September 11.

Shortly after the attacks, in a conversation with Vice-President Dick Cheney (recorded by Ari Fleischer), Bush said, “We’re at war, Dick, we’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.”

Likewise, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also for kicking their ass, but not necessarily finding out “who did this”.

According to CBS, hours after one of the planes hit the Pentagon, Rumsfeld made notes stating, “Judge whether good enough to hit S.H.”, and “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

And here we are now. Not related to either September 11 or Bali, Iraq is still good enough to hit, with a good enough bastard to get and a good enough ass to kick. Meanwhile Osama’s still recording messages rallying a world jihad.

By mass destructing Iraq, Howard’s argument is we will perhaps prevent weapons of mass destruction reaching terrorists.

Howard recently linked Bali with Iraq, when he said, “I will, amongst other things, be asking the Australian people to bear those circumstances in mind if we become involved in military contact with Iraq”.

Howard’s connection with Bali and attacking Iraq is yet another case of his talented use of the dog whistle. Sure it doesn’t matter they weren’t connected, but one day, according to Howard, another attack could be. Putting the two incidents together in a sentence is enough to prick up perhaps a couple of ears. Job done.

But many relatives of Bali victims didn’t appreciate the comments. As Maria Elfes said, “I don’t think you can use the memory of 89 people as an excuse for war”.

But would an Iraqi invasion prevent another Bali? It’s all very maybe. Are we really going to involve our troops in a war just because of a maybe?

Our head of state and man of cloth Governor-General Peter Hollingworth had a reason when waving off the departing Australian Servicemen and women. He was filmed saying, “Look, this is something that has to be done.” What? Like rape?

It’s a bit like one of the mob’s protest signs in the Melbourne march that read “Bombing for peace is like f…ing for virginity”.

If Howard’s national address on Thursday was supposed to provide some magical answers to Australian involvement in Iraq and its connection to bin Laden and Bali, surprise surprise, it didn’t.

The timing of the address, moments before giving the inevitable go ahead, is a gutless effort. Whether Tony Blair’s position is agreeable or not, at least the British PM has endeavoured to try to explain it.

In Howard’s speech, he said: “Australia is a Western nation, nothing can, will or should alter that fact, as such in this new world we are a terrorist target.”

But will our involvement in Iraq accentuate this situation? Will attacking Iraq rub the smile off Amrozi and the likes? Or will it merely put more daggers in men’s smiles, encouraging the wider use of a “fatal cocktail” of weapons, the very thing Howard says were supposedly fighting?

As the recently resigned Office of National Assessments analyst Andrew Wilkie said, “A war is what is most likely to force him (Hussein) to act recklessly, to possibly use weapons of mass destruction himself and to possibly play a terrorism card”.