ABSTRACT
It was the spring of 2003, and the march on Basra had begun. I was listening to the news on French radio because I was visiting Paris XIII, one of the branches of the University of Paris, to spend a term in their English department. The French had rejected the American and British call to arms, and their reporters were not embedded with the advancing armies and their supporting bombers in the air. So the newscasts were far more distant, but in spite of this detachedness, conveyed more anguish. As I listened, trying hard to follow the French, I found that what I was hearing kept bringing back memories of 1991, of the advance along the same road to Basra when the desert on either side was scattered with corpses-one of them incinerated at the wheel of his armoured vehicle, as Tony Harrison described in his blazing elegy after Eliot, "A cold coming":
I wanted to write down some thoughts and thoughts for women, too. I was glad to be in France, removed from the UK media's coverage, and from
Blair cozying up to Bush. I was glad to be in a country where the war was not represented as a selfless, brave, and chivalrous rescue of an oppressed nation but understood to be an unjustifiable and dangerous act of interference. In the same week, I think It was, Jacques Chirac flew to Algeria and plunged through the jubilating crowds who had turned out to receive him; it was the first time a French President had returned to the country after the colonial war there. The crowd cheered his promises to open new trading opportunities between France and Algeria. (I don't know what came of these undertakings, and Chirac was certainly self-interested and cynical, but It seemed to me then that he was taking the better part.)
Watching the news, sudden flares of light over cities under bombardment have become familiar; the spurts of fire explode jaggedly, out of time with the sound bursts, because of the distance of the cameras' position. Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, and before them Sarajevo, Mostar, all lie a little far off on a horizon in my mind's eye. I am always surprised when the footage moves in closer, and brings the intimate photographs of ordinary city streets with ordinary houses and sometimes even gardens, and I come face to face with the reality that people live in these places under fire.
