A New Kind Of War

My TV catalogues air strikes, laser guided missiles, smart bombs, stealth fighters, sorties, military attacks, precision targets - the beginnings of a new kind of war.

My TV introduces the experts. They introduce other experts. Generals give briefing sessions. Military maps illuminate the rugged stubble of field commanders out to quote the facts. Each day the war is reinvented, each day the war grows Jessica quotes this anecdote: A TV reporter drives a camouflaged jeep to a border outpost in search of the elusive butterfly of truth.  He files a story from his portable satellite dish showing a bayonet splicing his spine, a scud missile shoved hard up his arse, and veritable pack of wild dogs feasting on his balls. 

I told her that was one dumb journalist. I told her smart journalists perch on bar stools in five star hotels in cities sealed down with masking tape and air raid sirens, describing an interior that is indescribable, a people we only see in the shadow of tanks or the undercarriage of B 52s. 

 

On The Fifth Day

On the fifth day of the war burning blood fills my nostrils as dying by the flock, birds wash up on beaches smothered in the luxury of oil.  Jessica says the birds are a sure sign.  When their wings can no longer absorb the suffering of the world they perch on abandoned tanks, unable to fly, mourning what will never be again.

 
On the seventh day of the war I begin to wonder about the lack of soldiers. We never see them or if we do, they are quickly replaced by laser guided missiles disappearing down ventilator-shafts in quest of Saddam Hussein’s secret sleeping quarters.

On the tenth day of the war Jessica asks "If God had to choose who would it be?"  Tenth day the day God is invoked as one and all by all and one. Tenth night a line is drawn in the sand. Behind it Vietnam. Ahead the mother of all battles, the father of all victory, the brother of all sin, the sister of all temptation, the uncle of all lies, the bastard cousin of all truth. The green and white nexus of Baghdad glows at us from the TV screen. Jessica exclaims, “The American pilots must think it’s the fourth of July.”

 

POW Peters
I am too exhausted to reply and every time I begin to sleep I see POW British Airman John Peters. John Peters does not look directly at me.  He looks down or sideways.  His face radiates a singular despair and his speech is unbearably listless.  John Peters seems to me a new kind of icon. Neither hero or martyr, dead or alive. He is the phantom who steals my dreams and wraps them up in gauze   

Neither Jessica or I can find the strength to switch channels, prepare food, sleep or even attempt to coat ourselves with the semblance of orderly living. Jessica declares that out of sympathy we too must live in a state of war.  We too must simulate the civilians who have no food or drinking water and who huddle down in bomb shelters or else distil their existence through the crude filter of curfew.  In this way she confides we may even begin to understand the crisis at the bottom of this war’s soul.

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By the eightieth day of the war Saddam Hussein has become shaman, trickster, and antichrist, ripping helpless infants from humidicribs, severing breasts, testicles, heads, and arms. He is said to torture the innocent by the jail-full, proclaiming it his inescapable duty, blessing the faithful with bullets and the blood of virgin infidels. He appears simultaneously in fourteen sacred sites firing up millions of litres of the Gulf’s best oil, and as if this sorcery was not enough, urges jihad upon the world.

 

Shape Shifting With Saddam

But who is this Saddam, what is this vast procession waving white flags and marching in thin straight lines across the Kuwaiti desert?  Caught between the ticker tape of American surrender pamphlets and their own death squad’s bullets of obedience, why do they so quickly snuggle into the sleek rolling caravans of advancing tanks, trucks, and troops? 

No-one wants to fight daisy-cutter bombs that torch entire tracts of land in a frenzy of oxygen-sucking arson. No-one admits reclaiming Kuwait for you their Beloved Saddam. Some of these soldiers even kiss the cheeks of the Infidels. Some of these soldiers dance in their new found exuberance for surrender. “They could do with a good meal,” swears Jessica. 

 

UN Resolution 678

Jessica was growing more implacable by the hour. She kept asking if Tariq Aziz the Iraqi Foreign Minister was scheduled to make any more speeches. We had fallen in love with Tariq’s doublespeak and marveled at his ability to say nothing about everything with such utter conviction. Perhaps it was a trick he picked up from the Coalition Generals eternal media conferences. Perhaps it was George Bush’s helicopter pirouettes to Camp David.  Perhaps it was simply Javier Perez de Cuellar’s rheumy eyed dignity as he announced this war was way beyond United Nations Resolution 678.

 

Turkey Shooting

It was only when Tariq Aziz disappeared to Moscow on yet another fruitless errand of intransigence that we realised the war was coming to an end.  “A hundred hour trillion dollar extravaganza”, calculated Jessica, as first Kuwait was liberated and then the Elite Republican Guard fell beneath the trampoline boots of victory. 

When the Americans bombed an underground civilian shelter in central Baghdad, we turned the lounge-suite upside down and cut two small slits in the fabric - just wide enough to crawl under and peer out at the cable network reports streaming in.

“No use in jeopardising our position.”  I whispered to Jessica when Schwarzkopf sealed his destiny as master of the turkey shoot by declaring Saddam Hussein not worth the uniform Tel Aviv swore would unleash a chemical catastrophe over Israel, a catastrophe unseen since the Nazis pumped cyanide down the chimney stacks of genocide.

We were depressed at the wind of ill-fortune blowing over the tragedy besotted Kurds. One war ended and a thousand new ones beginning.  “Do you think it’s safe to come out?” Jessica asked. “They’ve cut off the electricity”, I replied. 

 

No TV.