Radio Review: John Simpson is one of those journalists you can mock and mock and then he turns up, again, with a great story. Last week, I must admit I allowed myself a snigger as the "liberator of Kabul" phoned in a live report from Kurdistan to the BBC World Service, writes Harry Browne.
Stuck on the war's missing front, he seemed to be over-dramatising his position when he called our attention to the US plane overhead and said that, frankly, he was nervous about using his satellite phone, in case the pilot should mistake him for an Iraqi scout.
This week, no sniggers. Just such a pilot delivered Simpson his "vision of hell". Too few of the outlets that used his words and images took care to point out to us that the death and devastation we had heard and seen, for all its horror, was not something unique to Kurds, US special forces, Western journalists and their translators. Simpson's vision of hell, dramatically captured, has been visited thousands of times over on people who have been unaccompanied by reporters and cameras.
So what about the Iraqis at the receiving end of airborne slaughter? We got one useful comparative perspective from laptop bombardier Eoghan Harris, allegedly invited on to Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) to talk about the United Nations, but really just there to have yet another go at the anti-war Left. You don't like seeing civilian children killed and maimed? Well, Harris put them in context: "I think I'm the sort of person who could be upset on seeing a dog being struck down by a car."
The only civilian deaths he could bring himself, stutteringly, to mention were the checkpoint "seven", and then he was off and running about Saddam's genocidal manipulation of the sanctions, which had killed far, far more children.
Kenny failed to point out that this is at least disputed, at worst nonsense. NGO and UN workers who were in Iraq during sanctions insist that the regime actually made more or less the best of an extraordinarily bad lot to keep people fed. (Now they've got the British army to show them how it's done.)
Even laying aside the question of whether sanctions or Saddam killed Iraq's children, Harris should really be smarter than to indulge in such apologetics for violence. Imagine a murder defendant pleading that his victim had been statistically more likely to die of cancer, so killing her had actually saved society from losing another victim to this dreadful disease. It's not really much consolation to the victim's family.
With no audible grin at his own cheek, Harris complained about the "extraordinary aggression" of Irish anti-war people. Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday), just back from New York, seemed to agree. Why, Ryan wondered, were anti-war people in Ireland so nasty, when in the US the arguments on both sides were characterised by such sweet reason? Maybe Harris and Ryan, beleaguered by our unpeaceable peace campaigners, prefer Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the information minister who smiles when he says "criminal mercenaries". If Mohammed survives, surely he merits a job in PR or the Sunday Independent.
Notwithstanding the Saeed sideshow, it's been grim drama in Iraq that has held most of the media attention in recent weeks. It seemed almost obscene, slightly embarrassing, when the North's local troubles made their brief entrance on the global stage on Tuesday. Around the precincts of this column, apart from our by-now- predictable political reaction to the incongruous confluence, we were reminded of another Northern-made drama that had failed to get above the radar a fortnight ago, but deserved some wee attention.
That was The Visitor, a recent Book at Bedtime (BBC Radio 4). Read somewhat breathlessly by Ballykissangel's Tina Kellegher, this was an unusual and notable novella of posh Dublin life in the early-to-mid-20th century, written by Maeve Brennan.
In terms of narrative, it's a strong but unstartling "woman's drama" of relationships across generations and distances. But as a sketch of repression, despair, anger and guilt in the Catholic middle-class of the time, it was well worth the radio time.
It's also an important piece of literary archaeology. Brennan emigrated from Ireland to New York in 1934 and wrote New Yorker sketches about life in her adopted island of Manhattan for 30 years. However, she also wrote a number of largely ignored short stories about "back home" (The Visitor was written in the 1940s, but only published in 2001, eight years after its author's death).
It reminds us of the hope that even forgotten human lives may be redeemed, and perhaps are even worth something more than that of a dog.