Women are odd creatures, a mass of contradictions. We love peace, harmony and order, yet let anyone threaten our children, and we are immediately transformed into raving and violent maniacs of the most primitive kind.
We are not merely concerned about our own offspring, either, for most of us cannot bear to think of children suffering in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, China and Burma.
What do you do when your own child grows up and wants to become a soldier? You try to talk him out of the idea, that's what, and when you fail, you try not to think about the whole nasty business.
Nik, my middle son, is a commando in the Greek Special Forces, and in 1997 he was part of a UN contingent stationed in Bosnia. On his return he showed me his snapshots. What do the red flags mean? I asked. They show you where you shouldn't walk, he said. Land mines. The day before he left Bosnia, a sapper had been blown up.
Land mines have killed or maimed at least a million people since 1975, and some of the monsters are still a danger in the Golan Heights, 40 years after they were first planted there.
Land mines then; cluster bombs now. These are bombs that have mini-bombs inside them. They thus carry much the same threat as land mines, in that they lie around undetonated for long periods. When they explode, innocent civilians, children among them, are all too often the victims.
Expatriates view their homelands through rose-coloured spectacles, but mine cracked when I learned the Howard Government had spent $14 million on these iniquitous weapons, the first time an Australian government had ever done so.
Those same glasses shattered entirely when I learned the Rudd Labor Government had not done the right thing either, standing in the way of initiatives at this week's Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster Munitions.
More than a hundred countries sent representatives to Dublin, in the hope of drafting a treaty banning the use and stockpiling of cluster bombs. The Pope, Desmond Tutu, the International Red Cross, UNICEF and World Vision were a few of the spiritual leaders and aid organisations calling for the ban.
America, China, Russia, Israel, Egypt, India and Pakistan had no representation at the conference. America, notoriously, has used cluster bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo.
Nonetheless, it was announced yesterday that