WP: A Year Later, Baghdad in Flames -- words, and images

[DeepModem Mom]

Images
In Iraq, Shock And Deja Vu
A Year Later, Baghdad in Flames Tells Another Story
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 18, 2004; Page C01


Baghdad's night is our midday, so when a bomb ripped through the Mount Lebanon Hotel yesterday, we saw something eerily reminiscent of last year's shock and awe. The night over Baghdad, illuminated in an orange glow of flames and destruction.

After the Xbox thrills of the initial campaign, the grunt's-eye view given to us by embedded reporters, much of the recent war has come to us as aftermath, the shells of twisted cars or the rubble of ruined buildings, caught after the fact, under the strangely reassuring glare of the morning sun. Men mill around the wreckage, casually, like boys poking a dead animal with sticks. But this war, we were reminded, began at night, like a fireworks show, and here we are again, one year later, watching a faraway world ablaze like a painting by Turner.

Just three days shy of the one-year anniversary, the enemies of occupation hit a hotel housing foreigners in the center of Baghdad. It was so close to Firdaus Square (where a statue of Saddam Hussein provided one of the war's happier, now superseded, images) that it was tempting to believe that the prosecutors of this resistance know full well the power of keeping one eye on death and the other on symbolism. The Bush administration was spending the week talking up the success of war, the distance we've come, the promise we've offered. Again we saw that statue, groaning from its plinth, offering the hope of a simple war.

Shock and awe was about the control of our magisterial military. The blast at the hotel near Firdaus Square was about that same military on the defensive, reacting to, rather than orchestrating, the special effects. Shock and awe was caught at a distance, cameras on rooftops, registering war as if it were a distant thunderstorm. The Mount Lebanon Hotel was near other hotels housing Western journalists, so it was caught in closer, finer, more horrifying detail. People (dead or alive?) were carried out of the wreckage, dressed in the sort of bedclothes none of us ever hopes to wear to an appointment with the world's media....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3034-2004Mar17.html

[readmylips]

1. Shock and Awe was about little man bush...

showing off, and using our military to make the point that he has big cohones. Bigger cohones than his daddy's. The guy is a psychopath. Still suffers from that daddy challenge.