The news on the television is of the bombing in Baghdad. I came out of the bedroom this morning and saw my wife watching the news with tears in her eyes. My wife is five months pregnant and, in ways that I can only imagine, she is aware of just how much life is precious and also vulnerable. And yet, I know that she and I, sitting in a suburban house in America, are shielded from the real news of the war that is being waged in our name. There was a retired colonel of the US Marine Corps on CNN last night; he smiled, and even chuckled, as he described the bombs falling on Iraq. A brave woman called in –the show was Larry King Live — and said that she found the colonel's behaviour obscene. We are watching the bared fangs of the killers. Not one of the reports have described what has happened so far to the innocent men and women and children who deserved neither Saddam Hussein nor George Bush.
There is much that is hidden from us, and it makes us feel isolated and helpless.
I would like to see the Iraqi women on television. We should know what a pregnant woman in Baghdad was feeling when the bombs were dropping around her. That must have been the thought, I decided for myself, that was making my wife cry. Once I started thinking of that, it occurred to me that I would like to know what the thoughts were of the wives and girlfriends of the American and British soldiers who have died.
I have no experience of war but I have met many widows. Today, as I watch the strangely disembodied spectacle of war on my screen, smoke rising in surreal shades in a landscape devoid of all human presence, I return to the memories of my meetings.