It is impossible to escape the pall that has been cast over everything by the horrible and grotesque war currently being waged in Iraq. No other news seems important right now. And mere entertainment feels both redundant and selfish.

How can we watch a dumb Hollywood movie or a soap on television when we know that, even as we plonk our sorry arses on the couch, almost an entire country is being levelled to the ground? How can we celebrate the things that normally are taken to have meaning when murder and destruction on a grand scale are going on in Basra and in Baghdad, and elsewhere, allegedly in the name of democracy?
It is hard to deal with what is happening in Iraq from the safe distance of 3,000 or so miles away. Just imagine, then, what it must be like to be in the thick of it, watching the bombers slicing through the skies overhead, dropping their fearsome lodes, and listening to the pounding of the artillery through day and night, night and day.
It is clear that there is no hope for the Iraqi forces, in terms of conventional warfare. There is no building that cannot be destroyed. There is no position that cannot be taken out. There is no pocket of resistance – how that phrase stinks! – that cannot ultimately be overwhelmed when you are prepared to do your worst, as the U.S. and the British are, with cluster bombs, hellfire rockets, Cruise Missiles and all of the other weapons of brutal destruction in their possession.

Listening to the British yak to the cameras about their progress, and their successes in the field, is only marginally less stomach-churning than hearing the twisted rhetoric of the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in Washington. These are bad motherfuckers in the very worst possible meaning of that phrase: there is, it seems, no depth that they will not plumb, in the pursuit of power. They, and the rest of the cadre that holds George Bush in thrall, will put the lives of their own at stake, no problem. They will butcher innocent Iraqi civilians as if they were worms. They will stop at nothing.
And they will accuse the Iraqis of just that while they wreak havoc among them.
As I write, it appears that Basra has fallen to the British. U.S. forces are on the edge of Baghdad, making hit and run assaults on the city in an attempt to lure the Iraqis out into open battle. The Americans boast that they killed 2,000 Iraqis in the previous 24 hours. The British are more circumspect but the same underlying assumption of superiority is there.
The war will be won by the invaders. But the fight may go on and on – and on. It is impossible to know just how long it will take to achieve control of Baghdad. But it is as chastening as it is distasteful to hear officers of the British Army, and many of the insultingly glib and patronising commentators who infest TV screens at all times of the day and night (inevitably, on Sky TV in particular) as well, glibly state that the likes of the Paras have learned how to deal with urban warfare in Northern Ireland.
That conflict, in case they have forgotten, lasted for 30 years and there is a doubt still that it is finally over. Will we see Iraqi guerilla activity and resistance carry on for as long into the future? It is by no means out of the question. And how many young Arabs have been recruited these past three weeks into the ranks of future suicide bombers?
And who will they strike? Where? And when? The answer is nobody knows…

0ur own government, meanwhile, continues to act in a shameful and abject way, adopting the pose of the three monkeys, even as a bloody massacre takes place. Not only this, but they seem to be prepared to blithely endorse any show of aggression on the part of the Gardai against protestors who feel the need to take some kind of moral stand on the issue.
Gardai were not wearing their identification numbers when they forced protestors back from outside the gates of the Dail in Kildare Street last week. The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, apparently sees nothing wrong in this.
I have an interest in the outcome of the mis-handling of the situation by the Gardai. As reported elsewhere in this issue, one of those pushed to the ground by our brave guardians of the peace was an 83-year old woman, Valentine Stokes. An aunt of mine, I can attest that she is a remarkably vigorous and strong character. But she is 83 and as vulnerable as someone of that age inevitably is to broken bones and other forms of injury when hurled to the ground.
That she could be violently manhandled by the custodians of law and order while engaged in a peaceful protest says a lot about the way in which things are shaping up in the brave new world being carved out by the current administration in Ireland.
Lots done – more to do in, you might say. Happy Easter, everyone.