If you are a decent
human being, war is going to offend you because it has no purpose other than
to satisfy someone's desire for power and profit. And it is the little people
who suffer. At the first whiff of trouble, the rich and the informed get
into their Mercedes-Benzes and off-road vehicles and leave. The poor people,
the very last of the dregs of society, can't escape. They get the bill.
The Guardian (UK)
Friday February 14, 2003
This is war
The US-led attack on Iraq in 1991 was one of the
worst-reported conflicts in history. A system of media management kept the
violent deaths of some 40,000 people out of the public view. War photographer
Don McCullin explains the crucial role photojournalists have in recording
events
Sitting here in a cottage in Somerset, I should perhaps be enjoying the
birdsong and the soft rolling hills. I'm not, because I live on a military
flight path, and instead of the birds I hear the engine noise of dive-bombing
aircraft flown by pilots who are readying themselves for a war in Iraq. C-130
transport planes are streaming into the air force base at Brize Norton, and
the flapping sound of Chinook helicopters keeps putting me back in Vietnam.
OK, I think, any moment now the doors are going to open and I'll jump out
and run across those rice fields.
If you are a decent human being, war is going to offend you because it has
no purpose other than to satisfy someone's desire for power and profit. And
it is the little people who suffer. At the first whiff of trouble, the rich
and the informed get into their Mercedes-Benzes and off-road vehicles and
leave. The poor people, the very last of the dregs of society, can't escape.
They get the bill.
I got into war photography because I felt I could approach it in a more dignified
way than other people. I felt compassion for the victims of war, and I believed
I would never do anything to betray that compassion. But I had not been to
war for several years when, in 1991, a friend of mine, the war correspondent
Charles Glass, telephoned from Damascus, and I suddenly felt the need to
go out and join him. A short time later, we were in Iraq, fleeing north with
the Kurds, who were being driven up into the mountains to die by Iraqi troops.
I remember visiting a hospital there when they brought in a boy who had been
hit by one of Saddam's helicopter bombs. The no-fly zone imposed by the allies
applied only to fixed-wing aircraft, so they flew over the Kurds in helicopters
and rolled bombs out of the side. This boy was burnt from head to toe; his
whole body was bleeding. I remember thinking, then, that I should give this
profession up.
Of course, it is the photographer's job to show some of that horror, to
say: this is the real war, this is what it's like on the ground, this is
what war does to you. That job that has been becoming increasingly difficult
ever since the US decided that the media had lost the war in Vietnam for them.
In 1982 came the Falklands war, and Margaret Thatcher's government decided
not to make the mistake the Americans had of giving reporters and photographers
free access to the hostilities. Instead, they set up the "pool" system, in
which a small number of journalists and photographers, supposedly picked
at random, supplied copy and images to be transmitted back home by the military.
The movements of the pool members were controlled by armed forces personnel.
This system was used in the last Gulf war and will be revived if, or when,
the next begins. As in 1991, reporters and photographers will have to decide
whether to toe the military line (assuming they win a place in the pool -
years after the Falklands, which I was unable to cover, I discovered that
I had been blacklisted from the start) or to try to make their own way to
the action, without protection and in constant danger of arrest. And if too
many choose the second option, that will create its own problems. In the
old days, if you came across a road block, you might be able to talk your
way though. That doesn't work if there are a dozen of you.
Of course, when the bullets start flying, the military don't want hundreds
of dead or injured journalists on their hands. But the fact is that we embarrass
them by exposing the holes in their propaganda. When I was in northern Iraq,
the Allies were giving the impression that there wasn't an intact Mig fighter
in the whole of the country; they even had the aerial photos to prove it.
Yet we found three or four fighters in perfect condition, hidden under camouflage
awnings.
It rankles to know that you are being so easily manoeuvred by the powers
that be. But you sometimes get to the stage where you are begging to be allowed
to the front; to be, in effect, given the chance to be killed. I have lost
enough friends over the years to know that this is a real danger.
Let's suppose that you do get to where the action is. What makes a good photograph?
Do you focus on the dead, like many of the photographers in these pages,
or on the living? Is it still possible to speak for the Iraqis incinerated
in the American ambush on the Basra road, or do you concentrate on the injured,
the women and children, the civilians? Do you want to create art, or to take
pictures? Some war photographers describe themselves as artists - all photographers
have a leaning to be artistic - but is war the right place to indulge this
inclination? There is a danger of walking through the killing fields and thinking
of Goya and modern icons, of press awards or prize ceremonies at the Hague.
I have only ever considered myself a photographer - nothing more, nothing
less. I went to war and thought of people and pain, not exhibitions and awards.
I looked into people's eyes and they would look back and there would be something
like a meeting of guilt. As a war photographer, you cannot escape guilt, particularly
when the man in front of you who is just about to be shot appeals to you
to help him.
Photography is not just about photographs; it's about communication. It's
not about you. It's not about art. You're there to record. Sometimes, all
too rarely, what you record is acts of human decency, of kindness and compassion
- I have seen men cradling dying comrades and weeping. But that's the only
side of war you will see that is beautiful.
________________________________________________
----------------
Few of the pictures you see on these pages were ever seen at the time.
The body parts of these men being shovelled into the mouths of the bulldozers
were men whose choice was to die at the front or be shot for deserting. This
time they face the same choice.
The Guardian (UK)
Friday February 14, 2003
'The most pitiful sight I have ever seen'
Maggie O'Kane, a rookie war reporter in 1991, explains
the meaning of 'collateral damage'
The 1991 Gulf war was my first experience as a war reporter. As a freelancer,
I had knocked on the door of the Irish Times's D'Olier Street office with
a piece of gold glittering in my palm: a valid Iraqi visa. I got to meet the
editor, who bought me a ticket to Baghdad. Abu Tariq, my taxi driver in the
capital, knew I wasn't quite sure how to be a war reporter. So he looked
after me, taking me home at night to his wife. On one of those nights, all
seven of his children were sitting around the dining room table, cutting up
their white cotton table cloth into 10in squares. "They're making gas masks
to cover their face with when the war comes," he said.
The first days of that war had a curiously surreal air. Most of the press
had left before the bombing started. The desperately ambitious, the thrill-seekers
and the conscientious stayed on. Still, we were 1,000 miles from the front.
We rattled around at breakfast in the al-Rashid banqueting hall. The bread
ran out. Our Iraqi censor, Sadoun, a large man who had gone to Aberdeen University
and liked whisky, would bring his pen to check the reports before we filed
them. Sometimes he censored, sometimes he didn't. It depended on the time,
our numbers, his boredom threshold. John Simpson bossed the Iraqis around
in his well-brought-up way. Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times kept a yellow
canary in her room like a heroine from a Sebastian Faulks novel, but nobody
worried too much about being gassed.
Then, one night, Abu Tariq took me to the war. At a bus station south of
Baghdad I came across a road filled with the wives, mothers and daughters
of the cannon fodder you see in these pages. They were the women of the soldiers
of the Basra Road. They were rushing at each battered minibus, taxi and truck
arriving from the front at Basra. Like black bees at a honeycomb, they were
hurling themselves at the survivors, pulling at the bloodied, wounded men
in search of their sons, their fathers and those they loved. "Have you seen
him?" "Where is he?" "Is he not with you?" Then, as each heard the news, she
would fall to her knees to mourn for one of the 37,000 men who would not
come home. It went on all night, a wail of pain and desperation. It was the
most pitiful sight I have ever witnessed.
Two days later, I flew home, my head still filled with the women's faces.
I picked up a copy of Newsweek on the plane. On the cover was the jubilant
General Norman Schwarzkopf. Inside was his description of their victory at
the Basra Road. There was obscene detail of F16s and laser-guided missiles,
and how they had trapped the fleeing Iraqi army from the air. He was reliving
the highlights as if they were the final moments of a cup match.
I cried on that plane. Partly still in shock at the women and the pain at
that Baghdad station, and partly with shame, because I knew we had done such
a lousy job of reporting the war. Few of the pictures you see on these pages
were ever seen at the time. The body parts of these men being shovelled into
the mouths of the bulldozers were men whose choice was to die at the front
or be shot for deserting. This time they face the same choice.
I've been back to Iraq many times. Mostly it has been to write about the
sanctions that have destroyed the people of that pitiful nation. In between,
I've been to other wars, but as this one builds, it becomes almost unbearable
to follow. Except at moments of sanity such as last week's life-affirming
stand by Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, when he told an astonished
Donald Rumsfeld: "You have to make the case; I'm sorry but I am not convinced."
After 10 years of reporting wars in Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and East
Timor, I believe passionately that war can only ever be the absolutely final
option for humanity. Unfortunately, we have been so protected from its pain
and horror by the impenetrable wall of censorship and euphemism - as we will
continue to be - that war is allowed to prevail as a legitimate means of
conducting human affairs.
Here is a bit of collateral damage: The first time I met Abu Ziad was in
1998. He had been the chief accountant with the British Iraqi Oil Company.
Then, he had five children and lived in a big house by a bomb shelter. He
recalled how during the Iran-Iraq war, when nearly 1 million young men died
on each side, he would be at home in Baghdad, hearing the sounds of women
wailing in the night for another lost son, husband or lover. He remembered
thanking God that he had married late, and that his children were too young
to be sent to fight. Then, three years after that war, President Saddam led
them into another. At 2am on February 13 1991, two bombs hit the al-Amiriya
bomb shelter near his home. The first was a drilling bomb that pierced the
roof and cut open the central heating tank. Boiling water poured through the
ceiling on to the women and children below, who were playing dominoes, watching
Tom and Jerry videos dubbed into Arabic and eating kebabs.
Only 15 minutes later, the second bomb exploded with such force that he
never had the chance to identify the bodies of his wife and four of their
five children: Zena, aged 14; Fuad, aged 12; Lena, aged seven; and Sadaad,
aged six. "I saw a body being brought out, then I saw it was Zena's, but they
were piling them on top of each other and I couldn't see if it was her. We
weren't allowed to go close." Later that morning, Abu Ziad stood outside the
shelter. He remembers noticing the ankles of the dead women and children.
Their skin had been branded with the metal coils of red-hot mattress springs
as they struggled to climb over the metal beds, and each other, to get out.
The doors had been locked for security. Four hundred and six people, mostly
women and children, died inside.
_______________________
[excerpt]
These massive bulldozers, with armoured cockpits impervious to small-arms
fire, smoothed away any hint of the carnage. "A lot of guys were scared, but
I enjoyed it," said PFC Joe Queen, an ACE driver awarded a Bronze Star for
his performance in the battle...Cheney, brimming with contempt and hostility
for the press, saw journalists as critics of the military who must be contained.
"Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed," he said after the war.
"The information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a
lot of confidence that I could leave that to the press."
The Guardian (UK)
Friday, February 14, 2003
'What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with
people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have
killed thousands'
Patrick J Sloyan on how the mass slaughter of a
group of Iraqis went unreported
On February 25 1991 the war correspondent Leon Daniel arrived at a battlefield
at the tip of the neutral zone between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Daniel was one
of a pool of journalists who had been held back from witnessing action the
previous day, when Desert Storm's ground war had been launched. There, right
where he was standing, 8,400 soldiers of the US First Infantry Division -
known as the Big Red One - had attacked an estimated 8,000 Iraqis with 3,000
Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees and armoured
personnel carriers.
Daniel had seen the aftermath of modest firefights in Vietnam. "The bodies
would be stacked up like cordwood," he recalled. Yet this ferocious attack
had not produced a single visible body. It was a battlefield without the
stench of urine, faeces, blood and bits of flesh. Daniel wondered what happened
to the estimated 6,000 Iraqi defenders who had vanished. "Where are the bodies?"
he finally asked the First Division's public affairs officer, an army major.
"What bodies?" the major replied.
Months later, Daniel and the world would learn why the dead had eluded eyewitnesses,
cameras and video footage. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them firing
their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs
mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of
sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the trenches. Just behind the
tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets
into Iraqi troops.
"I came through right after the lead company," said Colonel Anthony Moreno.
"What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs
sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."
Two other brigades used the same tank-mounted ploughs and Bradleys to obliterate
an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches. They moved swiftly. The operation
had been rehearsed repeatedly, weeks before, on a mile-long trench line built
according to satellite photographs. The finishing touches were made by armoured
combat earth-movers (ACEs). These massive bulldozers, with armoured cockpits
impervious to small-arms fire, smoothed away any hint of the carnage. "A
lot of guys were scared, but I enjoyed it," said PFC Joe Queen, an ACE driver
awarded a Bronze Star for his performance in the battle.
What happened in the neutral zone that day is a metaphor for the art of
war in an era when domestic politics is often more important than the predictable
outcome on the field of battle. In 1991 American voters rallied behind President
George Bush Sr for the seemingly bloodless confrontation with Saddam Hussein.
Neatly hidden from a small army of journalists was the reality of war - a
reality that can make these very same voters recoil in disapproval.
His son is likely to use the same sort of tactics to blind one of the world's
freest and most influential media establishments. Running the show for President
George Bush is the man who manipulated global perceptions of the first Gulf
war for Bush Sr: Dick Cheney. Then defence secretary and now vice-president,
Cheney is likely to buffalo the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN
and others ready to bend to US government censorship.
According to White House officials, no final decisions have been made by
Bush, Cheney and current defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We're still negotiating
with the media," said one administration official. But Bush has already implemented
ground rules that require journalists to give up their mobile and satellite
phones to military commanders who would control the movements of these so-called
pool reporters during Desert Storm II. If the final rules, organised by the
Pentagon, are anything like the pool system designed by Bush Sr and Cheney
in 1991, the world will be given a cloudy mixture of video footage and misinformation
that will fog the reality of war.
Daniel, the wire service veteran, was part of the 1991 pool system. About
150 American journalists, photographers and film crews were scattered among
attacking units. Their reports were supposed to be fed to a rear headquarters
and then shared by hundreds of journalists from around the world. "They wouldn't
let us see anything," said Daniel, who has seen just about everything there
is to see in war. Not a single eyewitness account, photograph or strip of
video of combat between 400,000 soldiers in the desert was produced by this
battalion of professional observers.
Most of the grisly photos from Desert Storm seen today were the work of
independent journalists who raced to the "Highway of Death" north of Kuwait,
where war planes had destroyed thousands of vehicles in which Iraqi soldiers
had fled after the start of the ground war. The area was free of the military
handlers who routinely interrupted interviews to chastise soldiers into changing
their statements while reporters stood back, or forcibly removed film from
cameras that captured images deemed offensive by an Army public affairs officer.
Cheney, brimming with contempt and hostility for the press, saw journalists
as critics of the military who must be contained. "Frankly, I looked on it
as a problem to be managed," he said after the war. "The information function
was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence that I could
leave that to the press."
Since being brought into government as an intern by Donald Rumsfeld, then
a congressman, Cheney has spent most of his adult life fencing with the media
and learning its strengths and weaknesses. A stunning victory in 1991 was
the media's agreement to permit the Pentagon to censor journalists' reports
before they were printed or broadcast. In the past the Pentagon had left
censorship up to individual reporters. During 10 years of war in Vietnam,
not one journalist violated self-imposed rules against reporting, for example,
specific locations of attacks.
As a result, the conventional wisdom was that the government was not violating
the First Amendment to the Constitution: that Congress "will make no law
to abridge [. . .] freedom of the press". Only a handful of journalists went
to federal court to challenge the government censorship imposed by Bush, Cheney
and Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The court ruled
the suit moot - the war was over - but invited the press to try again so
that the issue might be settled. It never was.
The media was more duped than cowed. Cheney won over some people with the
promise that places in the pool would give them an advantage over competitors.
For instance, a Washington Post pool reporter kept to himself all details
of a US Marine operation for exclusive use by the Post and, later, a book.
For independent journalists, life was much more difficult. More than 70
operating outside the pool system were arrested, detained, threatened at
gunpoint or chased from the front line. Army public affairs officers made
nightly visits to hotels and restaurants in Hafir al Batin, a Saudi town on
the Iraqi border. Reporters and photographers would bolt from the table. The
slower ones were arrested.
But when the ground war started, the mighty were hamstrung along with the
mediocre. The Associated Press, which benefited most from a system that turned
all journalists into wire service reporters, sent photographer Scott Applewhite
to cover victims of a Scud missile attack near Dahran. The warhead had hit
an American tent, killing 25 army reservists and wounding 70. It was the
single biggest loss to Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm. Applewhite, an
accredited pool member, was stopped by US Army military police. When he objected,
they punched and handcuffed him while ripping the film from his cameras.
Cheney made sure it was just as bad for the rest of the pool. When the ground
war started, the defence secretary declared a "media blackout", blocking all
reports. After the war, General Norman Schwarzkopf and his aides revealed
that the blackout was ordered because of fears that Saddam would use chemical
weapons on allied forces. Potential news reports of soldiers writhing in agony
from a cloud of sarin nerve gas had spooked the president and his commanders.
"No pictures of that," said General Richard Neal, who directed ground operations
during the war.
As a result, reports and film were delayed or "lost" by military commanders
so that most of it arrived too late for most deadlines. Neal and Schwarzkopf
provided the bulk of briefings and videos in Saudi Arabia, and these were
the first reports to filter through; many became the basis of the most lasting
perceptions of Desert Storm. Gun camera footage always showed empty bridges
or aircraft hangars being destroyed by "smart bombs" - laser-guided munitions
that never struck a single human. But only 6% of the munitions used against
Iraq could be guided to a target. Over 94% were far less surgical during the
30-day air war, which often saw 400 sorties a day. Those bombs depended on
gravity and variable winds, and were capable of causing "collateral damage"
to nearby unarmed civilians.
The global television audience was awed by Tomahawk cruise missiles roaring
from the decks of US Navy warships at sea. But less than 10% hit their targets.
The missile's accuracy depends on landmarks that can be spotted by an on-board
camera that can shift the weapon's direction. But the featureless desert
led many Tomahawks to wander away like so many lost patrols, according to
Pentagon studies.
Schwarzkopf conducted televised briefings about the allied counterattack
on Saddam's Scud missiles that had terrorised Saudi Arabia as well as Israel.
Yet an air force study after the war showed that Iraq had ended up with as
many Scud launchers as it had possessed before the war started. A murky Schwarzkopf
video showed the destruction of what seemed to be a Scud launcher, but later
turned out to be a bombed oil truck.
Controlling the briefings, the videos and the press during Desert Storm was
an extension of US policy started by President Ronald Reagan and his defence
chief, Caspar Weinberger. It was Weinberger, an anglophile, who admired Margaret
Thatcher's manipulation of the media during the Falklands war, which led
directly to her political revival in 1982. A year later, Weinberger took control
of the US media when Reagan found himself in a deepening hole in Lebanon.
On October 23 1983, 241 US Marines died after a truck laden with explosives
destroyed a makeshift barracks at Beirut airport. The massacre suddenly focused
attention on the ageing actor's foreign policy decisions as the reports and
pictures showed the removal of American bodies. Within 48 hours of the bombing,
the president dispatched the first wave of 5,000 American troops to Grenada
in the Caribbean.
But the invasion angered Thatcher. Grenada was linked to the UK as a member
of the Commonwealth. Only the previous week, Washington had informed London
that there was no need for outside intervention, as local political turmoil
was likely to play itself out without further bloodshed. Geoffrey Howe, Britain's
foreign minister, was explicit. "The invasion of Grenada was clearly designed
to divert attention," Howe said in an interview. "You had disaster in Beirut;
now triumph in Grenada. 'Don't look there,' " he said, gesturing with his
forefinger, " 'look over here.' "
Reporters were banned from Grenada. Those who tried to land on the island,
such as Morris Thompson of Newsday, were arrested and imprisoned on US ships
offshore. All details and videos were supplied by military reporters and photographers
at Pentagon briefings.
The media barons howled, but little changed. When Bush Sr invaded Panama
in 1989, journalists were once again banned. Democratic congressman Charles
Rangle of New York still insists that as many as 5,000 civilians in Panama
City were killed by US invaders. But there are no pictures, no eyewitness
accounts.
The invasion of Panama and the arrest of Manuel Noriega were, like Desert
Storm later, something of a political triumph for Bush. But the reality of
that particular war asserted itself during a televised briefing by the president.
It was just at the end of the session, when Bush was wisecracking with reporters,
that most networks split their screens to show the arrival of dead US soldiers
from Panama.
Bush was caught bantering as flag-draped coffins arrived at an air force
base in Dover, Delaware - a military mortuary. Later that week, Bush ordered
the press banned from covering the arrival ceremonies for the fallen. President
Clinton continued the ban. And his successor, President George Bush, also
wants to keep the dead out of the national limelight.
· Patrick J Sloyan's reporting on the war after the end of Desert
Storm won the Pulitzer prize for international reporting in 1992.
__________________________
The Guardian (UK)
Friday, February 14, 2003
A cold coming
THIS PICTURE [PICTURE APPEARS IN PRINT EDITION] WAS ONE OF THE
MOST SHOCKING IMAGES OF THE WAR TO HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN 1991. THE
GUARDIAN RAN IT ALONGSIDE THIS SPECIALLY COMMISSIONED POEM BY TONY HARRISON.
[CAPTION UNDER PICTURE READS: IRAQI SOLDIER BURNED TO DEATH ON THE ROAD TO
BASRA, PHOTOGRAPHED BY KENNETH JARECKE. "I'D SEEN A COUPLE OF CASUALTIES
HERE AND THERE IN KUWAIT, BUT THE FIRST SERIOUS BODIES WERE ON HIGHWAY 8,"
SAYS JARECKE. "THIS PICTURE HAS BECOME WELL KNOWN, BUT I DIDN'T THINK
IT WAS ANYTHING SPECIAL WHEN I TOOK IT. I WAS JUST ONE OF MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS
THERE. I THINK THE REASON IT STANDS OUT IS THAT YOU CAN IMAGINE THE
DRIVER ALIVE. I BELIEVE I HAVE CAPTURED HIS HUMANITY. HE IS FIGHTING
TO GET OUT OF HIS BURNING VEHICLE, AND ANYONE LOOKING AT THE PHOTOGRAPH CAN
UNDERSTAND HOW POWERFUL THE DESIRE TO LIVE IS"
I saw the charred Iraqi lean towards me from bomb-blasted screen,
his windscreen wiper like a pen ready to write down thoughts for men,
his windscreen wiper like a quill he's reaching for to make his will.
I saw the charred Iraqi lean like someone made of Plasticine
as though he'd stopped to ask the way and this is what I heard him say:
"Don't be afraid I've picked on you for this exclusive interview.
Isn't it your sort of poet's task to find words for this frightening mask?
If that gadget that you've got records words from such scorched vocal cords,
press RECORD before some dog devours me mid-monologue."
So I held the shaking microphone closer to the crumbling bone:
"I read the news of three wise men who left their sperm in nitrogen,
three foes of ours, three wise Marines with sample flasks and magazines,
three wise soldiers from Seattle who banked their sperm before the battle.
Did No 1 say: God be thanked I've got my precious semen banked.
And No 2: O praise the Lord my last best shot is safely stored.
And No 3: Praise be to God I left my wife my frozen wad?
So if their fate was to be gassed at least they thought their name would
last,
and though cold corpses in Kuwait they could by proxy procreate.
Excuse a skull half roast, half bone for using such a scornful tone.
It may seem out of all proportion but I wish I'd taken their precaution.
They seemed the masters of their fate with wisely jarred ejaculate.
Was it a propaganda coup to make us think they'd cracked death too,
disinformation to defeat us with no post-mortem millilitres?
Symbolic billions in reserve made me, for one, lose heart and nerve.
On Saddam's pay we can't afford to go and get our semen stored.
Sad to say that such high tech's uncommon here. We're stuck with sex.
If you can conjure up and stretch your imagination (and not retch)
the image of me beside my wife closely clasped creating life . . ."
(I let the unfleshed skull unfold a story I'd been already told,
and idly tried to calculate the content of ejaculate:
the sperm in one ejaculation equals the whole Iraqi nation
times, roughly, let's say, 12.5 though .5's not now alive.
Let's say the sperms were an amount so many times the body count,
2,500 times at least (but let's wait till the toll's released!).
Whichever way Death seems outflanked by one tube of cold bloblings banked.
Poor bloblings, maybe you've been blessed with, of all fates possible, the
best
according to Sophocles ie "the best of fates is not to be"
a philosophy that's maybe bleak for any but an ancient Greek
but difficult these days to escape when spoken to by such a shape.
When you see men brought to such states who wouldn't want that "best of
fates"
or in the world of Cruise and Scud not go kryonic if he could,
spared the normal human doom of having made it through the womb?)
He heard my thoughts and stopped the spool: "I never thought life futile,
fool!
Though all Hell began to drop I never wanted life to stop.
I was filled with such a yearning to stay in life as I was burning,
such a longing to be beside my wife in bed before I died,
and, most, to have engendered there a child untouched by war's despair.
So press RECORD! I want to reach the warring nations with my speech.
Don't look away! I know it's hard to keep regarding one so charred,
so disfigured by unfriendly fire and think it once burned with desire.
Though fire has flayed off half my features they once were like my fellow
creatures',
till some screen-gazing crop-haired boy from Iowa or Illinois,
equipped by ingenious technophile put paid to my paternal smile
and made the face you see today an armature half-patched with clay,
an icon framed, a looking glass for devotees of 'kicking ass',
a mirror that returns the gaze of victors on their victory days
and in the end stares out the watcher who ducks behind his headline: GOTCHA!
or behind the flag-bedecked page 1 of the true to bold-type-setting SUN!
I doubt victorious Greeks let Hector join their feast as spoiling spectre,
and who'd want to sour the children's joy in Iowa or Illinois
Or ageing mothers overjoyed to find their babies weren't destroyed?
But cabs beflagged with SUN front pages don't help peace in future ages.
Stars and Stripes in sticky paws may sow the seeds for future wars.
Each Union Jack the kids now wave may lead them later to the grave.
But praise the Lord and raise the banner (excuse a skull's sarcastic manner!)
Desert Rat and Desert Stormer without the scars and (maybe) trauma,
the semen-bankers are all back to sire their children in their sack.
With seed sown straight from the sower dump second-hand spermatozoa!
Lie that you saw me and I smiled to see the soldier hug his child.
Lie and pretend that I excuse my bombing by B52s,
pretend I pardon and forgive that they still do and I don't live,
pretend they have the burnt man's blessing and then, maybe, I'm spared confessing
that only fire burnt out the shame of things I'd done in Saddam's name,
the deaths, the torture and the plunder the black clouds all of us are under.
Say that I'm smiling and excuse the Scuds we launched against the Jews.
Pretend I've got the imagination to see the world beyond one nation.
That's your job, poet, to pretend I want my foe to be my friend.
It's easier to find such words for this dumb mask like baked dogturds.
So lie and say the charred man smiled to see the soldier hug his child.
This gaping rictus once made glad a few old hearts back in Baghdad,
hearts growing older by the minute as each truck comes without me in it.
I've met you though, and had my say which you've got taped. Now go away."
I gazed at him and he gazed back staring right through me to Iraq.
Facing the way the charred man faced I saw the frozen phial of waste,
a test-tube frozen in the dark, crib and Kaaba, sacred Ark,
a pilgrimage of Cross and Crescent the chilled suspension of the Present.
Rainbows seven shades of black curved from Kuwait back to Iraq,
and instead of gold the frozen crock's crammed with Mankind on the rocks,
the congealed genie who won't thaw until the World renounces War,
cold spunk meticulously jarred never to be charrer or the charred,
a bottled Bethlehem of this come- curdling Cruise/Scud-cursed millennium.
I went. I pressed REWIND and PLAY and I heard the charred man say:
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