When oil matters more than children

Our moral priorities go badly astray when war is measured in barrels rather than bodies, writes Gerry Georgatos.

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

We are told what is happening to oil prices, shipping routes, insurance premiums, inflation, plastics, production and the cost of living. Maps of the Strait of Hormuz appear on our screens. Analysts explain the importance of the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Economists calculate how many barrels of oil can pass through a sea corridor and how much more drivers might pay for bowser.

So where are the children?

Where are the names and faces of those buried under razed houses? Where are the children whose limbs have been amputated, whose schools have turned into graves, whose minds will be bombarded with bombs long after the financial markets have recovered?

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

The Strait of Hormuz is unquestionably important. In peacetime, approximately one-fifth of world trade passed through here. Deterioration of this situation has serious consequences, especially for poor households who are already struggling with food, electricity and transportation costs. But the economic consequences should be reported as the consequences of the war, not as the actual tragedy of the war.

The real tragedy is people killing people. The war began with a US-Israeli surprise attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, and has since expanded with attacks and reprisals involving armed forces in Iran, the US, Israel, the Gulf states, and elsewhere in the region. It is inexcusable for any government or armed group to attack civilians, civilian vessels, or the infrastructure on which ordinary people depend.

Iranian attacks should be scrutinized. So should the attacks of America, Israel and their allies. Human life does not gain or lose value depending on the flag that flies over the weapon that destroys it.

In the early days, UNICEF reported It was stated that approximately 180 children were killed in Iran. It was reported that 168 girls were among those killed in the attack carried out while classes were continuing at Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab. They were mostly children between the ages of seven and 12.

One hundred sixty-eight girls. Do not rush to exceed this figure.

Imagine school photos. Imagine unfinished handwriting in exercise books. Imagine parents waiting outside hospitals, searching through lists, calling phones that will never be answered again. Imagine that 168 beds were left empty that night.

Within ten days of the escalation of regional tensions, More than 1,100 children reported killed or injured in affected countries. However, the dominant public discourse soon returned to oil, gas, tanker movements, global supply chains and consumer prices.

The media did not invent these concerns. Governments, markets and audiences demand them. But journalism makes moral choices through repetition and proportion. The thing he puts at the beginning of every bulletin is the thing society has been taught to fear the most. If the price of gasoline is ahead and child deaths become a paragraph below it, we are not just describing a sequence of facts. We are producing an order with human value.

This is not new.

In 2003, the United States, Britain, Australia and their partners invaded what he called “Iraq”.coalition of the willing“I have long called this the coalition to kill. The world was repeatedly warned about weapons of mass destruction that had not been found. Governments encouraged certainty where there was none, and most established media reported claims to power more diligently than they questioned them.

Iraq was not just invaded. A society has fallen apart. Its schools, hospitals, water systems, homes, institutions and cultural heritage were devastated by occupation, rebellion and sectarian violence. The devastation continued long after the television networks withdrew their reporters and found a new war.

of Brown University War Costs the project estimates that more than 940,000 people were directly killed in major post-9/11 war zones, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. More than 432,000 were civilians. These figures do not include all those who indirectly died due to the destruction of health systems, livelihoods, water resources and communities.

These people cannot be pigeonholed into the sterile term “collateral damage.” They had names. They were loved. They were expected to come home.

The same moral escapades occurred in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Military operations were announced with the polished words of necessity: precision strikes, strategic objectives, degradation of capacity, stability, and inevitable casualties. But there is no certainty in the life of a child who watches his parent disappear in a fire. There is no stability in a home scattered across borders. There is no clinical terminology that can clear blood warfare.

This is not meant to romanticize the Iranian state, ignore repression, or excuse the violence perpetrated by Iran or its forces. No need for conspiracy theory. The reality before us is scary enough.

This requires one consistent principle: No state has supreme authority to kill civilians. No child deserves to live more because he was born in Perth, London or Washington rather than Tehran, Minab, Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus, Sanaa or Gaza. International law cannot be a decorative limitation when it is a weapon used against enemies and allies are responsible.

The economic framework contains another bitter contradiction. We warn that dwindling oil and gas supplies could reduce production, disrupt petrochemicals and make plastic products more expensive. However, humanity is already drowning in plastic and microplastics. Oil addiction accelerates climate destruction. Perhaps the disruption of the fossil fuel glut should trigger an urgent transition, not a new war, to ensure the continued movement of hydrocarbons.

Imagine if the massive spending on missiles, planes, drones, and interceptors were instead spent on renewable energy, hospitals, schools, water security, and poverty alleviation. Imagine if our first question wasn’t: “How fast can the oil flow continue?” However, “How quickly can the bombing be stopped?”

When politicians say military action is necessary to protect “our way of life,” we must ask what kind of life is being protected. A lifestyle focused on constant consumption cannot morally outweigh another person’s right to survival.

I have spent most of my life around people at their worst moments: families torn apart by suicide, children harmed by institutions, people incarcerated, impoverished, displaced or abandoned. Parkinson’s disease now battles my body every day. It slowed my movements and prevented me from speaking, but it did not silence my belief that every person is important.

Indeed, illness sharpened this belief. Life is no less precious when the body becomes hard. A person does not disappear when communication breaks down. And when a child lives under a different flag, speaks another language, or practices another religion, that child is not sacrificed.

Sometimes I despair of the “human race” as I watch governments repeat the barbarism of previous generations. We have developed machines that can see across continents and weapons capable of killing them, but we have not developed the moral courage to put human life above national arrogance, military domination and commercial convenience.

We now talk with concern about AI having too much control. I am more afraid of the murderous impulses that currently control people. If AI is to serve humanity, let it help us expose propaganda, document civilian suffering, and disrupt the mechanism of dehumanization, not precipitate war or automate the decision to kill.

The media must also choose what it wants to be. He can remain the power’s stenographer and hourly commentator of the markets. Or he may return to his moral purpose: to bear witness, question official claims, name the dead, and remind distant audiences that there are people at the bottom of every geopolitical diagram.

Report the Strait of Hormuz. Report the Red Sea. Report inflation and cost of living. However, never talk about these issues as if they are more important than the cost of death.

Manage each newsletter with the kids. Then with mothers and fathers, with the sick and the elderly.

Ask who authorized the strike. Ask what is known about the school, hospital, or neighborhood. Ask who will be held responsible. Return the next day and the day after that. Don’t let governments bury people twice; First under the rubble, then under the silence.

The measure of civilization is not whether the oil continues to flow. It is whether the children are allowed to live or not.