Section 23 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 March 07 Friday.
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This entry: detailed description of a casualty of military action. If you do not wish to encounter such material, please move to another planet. Real quickly.

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By this time it's clear that Saddam Hussein has a choice: fight and die or disarm and die. He seems pretty calm about it, so maybe he's resigned to the fact, and is focused on looking good for history. The war seems to be coming at us with a great big rush.

Today's copy of the International Herald Tribune, as published in Japan, has a color photo of war dead right on the front page. It's quite an extraordinary photo, the sort of thing you only expect to see if you go poking around in the grimier areas of the Internet.

The photo shows, in the foreground, an unshaven guy sprawled flat on his back on the uneven surface of a sandy street. He's quite possibly dead. He's wearing a kind of shapeless coat of a kind of blackish gray, and around one baseball-sized area of white this coat has peeled back.

Where the coat has peeled back, there's red stuff mixed with the fabric, and it looks like blood. But what is the white? I can't work it out. The white seems to be the baselayer, so it doesn't make sense to imagine that it's a bandage. Plus, the scene is one of confusion, people in the background running away into the smoke and dust, people in the middle ground - one, two, three of them - lying on the ground, possibly dead.

There's a guy in a white coat in the middle ground, and he's standing, the coat unbuttoned, and he has one hand in a pocket, and the other hand - which seems to be gloved with white - apparently clutched to his mouth. He may have come from the white vehicle to the left, which may be an ambulance - I can make out the letters "CE" and what looks like half an "N" to make "NCE".

Anyway, back to the guy in the foreground. He's been wounded, somehow, but is it an exit wound or an entry wound? Because of the way the cloth is standing up, as if something burst outward through the shapeless coat, it seems to be an exit wound. But there doesn't seem to be much blood, although there is blood on the guy's right hand, which is sprawled out behind him.

My guess - and it's just a guess - is that the white stuff I can see might be a layer of fat. If the guy was already flat on his back when a projectile of some kind hit him, and if that projectile struck him above the navel and ripped its way across the surface of his body, peeling back the skin and opening up the body down to the layer of subcutaneous fat, then that might account for the white stuff that I'm seeing, and might explain why the cloth of the coat looks as if it has been forced upwards, and might explain why there are not massive amounts of blood everywhere. But I don't really know.

What I really wonder about, when I look at this photo, is the state of mind of whoever chose to put that on the front page. The International Herald Tribune is not the tabloid press. It's the kind of newspaper that pays attention to stuff like cutting edge developments in the world of science and the state of the auction market for fine art. This kind of newspaper doesn't usually deliver dead bodies to the breakfast table. So it's my guess - and it's just a raw guess, of course - that whoever put that picture on the front page had a sense of going out on a limb.

The caption for the photo is objective journalism through and through, just the facts, thanks:-

"At least 11 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 were wounded at the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza during raids by the Israeli Army. The incursions came a day after a suicide bomber killed 15 Israelis on a crowded bus in Haifa."

I've just had a look at an Arab news site, www.aljazeerah.info, and right now they have the identical picture on their site, only with this caption:-

"Bodies of 13 Palestinians massacred by Israeli occupation terroristic forces, lie on a street in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip early on Thursday."

And in their photos section they have a picture of dead men on stretchers with green cloth covering their bodies, and this caption:-

"8 of the 11 Palestinian martyrs who were murdered by Israeli occupation terrorist forces in Jabalia refugee camp yesterday. 130 more Palestinians were injured, 30 of whom are in serious conditions. This was in revenge for the yesterday's suicide bomb, which was in revenge to two months of Israeli killing of Palestininians".

I just checked with an Israeli news outlet, www.haaretzdaily.com, and I find their focus is a little different: "Four more victims of Wednesday's suicide bombing aboard a bus in Haifa wre laid ti rest Friday."

This is the mess that George Bush now says that he is going to solve by killing a whole bunch of people in Iraq. I think that notion is an exercise in hallucinating stupidity, too ridiculous to warrant taking seriously, but maybe George Bush really believes it. With that guy, who knows?

Another of the photos in the www.aljazeerah.info photo section for March 2003 shows a kid throwing a stone at some kind of armored Israeli vehicle.

The caption is:-

"A Palestinian school girl throwing a stone at the symbol of evil on earth, the Israeli occupation of Palestine".

Regardless of the rights or wrongs of that "symbol of evil" statement, I'm ready to bet she believes it. And I don't think Saddam Hussein bought her the stone.

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