Reportage: One day, the hostilities in Iraq will disappear from our screens and newsrooms and join the stories filed in the archives on Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan.
But for some who fired the bullets and for all who received them, the pity will go on. War is an obscenity which rots the limbs and minds of victor and vanquished alike and which never ends.
What if Jon Lee Anderson, had waited until after the recent Iraqi elections to write his account of the fall of Baghdad? He left just before the revelations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the beheading of Nicholas Berg, a young American civilian. Paul Bremer, the new US administrator, had announced to the world that Iraq was now sovereign and liberated, just as President Bush had promised. It was time to move on, as Tony Blair famously begs his critics in Westminster.
Perhaps it was wise for Anderson, who writes for the New Yorker, to move on, to complete his journal before the recent elections added layers of legitimacy to the veneer of coalition rhetoric and complicated the anti-war argument. For this is the work of a writer who has learned from past experience in the thick of battle that war is indeed an obscenity which screams, long after it is declared over, in the lives of the bereaved, the maimed, the raped and their children.
This is the story of war from the inside, told by a writer detached himself from the military convoys which protected the lives of most of the war journalists but at the price of editing the sounds and pictures which they filed back home. This left him vulnerable to fire from friends and enemies fighting for control of Baghdad, but it leaves us with a memorable account of the daily terror experienced by its citizens.
"I caught glimpses of some prisoners staring out from the bars of upper stories of the cellblocks," the author begins, describing the chaos he witnessed when Saddam released hundreds of prisoners from Abu Ghraib. "Human shit clung like caked mud to the razor wire that was looped outside their barred windows." The sight and smell are not enough to distract him from the presence of a pretty Italian television journalist in skin-tight jeans. She got too close to her story and was being groped greedily by these liberated wretches who must have thought Saddam had a sense of humour after all. "I don't think it was a good day to wear Armani," she allowed, as our intrepid author pulled her to safety.
Anderson spends the first half of the book introducing the motley characters who fill in the background to his war in the streets and hospitals and state ministries of Baghdad. There is Patrick the Irish-American - ex-Vietnam, Somalia, Northern Ireland - now a lone film-maker with a tatoo on his skull, looking to Iraq to cure his addiction to violence and destruction. "I love death," he tells Anderson. "I know it's wrong, but I do . . . Isn't that why you're here too?"
Anderson had some lingering affection for the "Human Shields", gathered in a convoy of buses and caravans from across Europe to put their bodies between the enemy combatants - only to find themselves feted and housed cynically by the apparatchiks of the Baath Party. The affection did not extend to their leader - one Ken O'Keefe, a Californian hippie with a teardrop tattooed on his cheek and Sanskrit on his neck. O'Keefe was once a US marine until he saw the light. "Hell, you read a few Chomsky books and you get a pretty clear picture of US foreign policy." Awesome.
Anderson's descriptive skills are displayed at their finest in the second half of the book. Here he comes face to face with the suffering which, for him, is the only story worthy of the truthful war reporter, and the one which our media find too indecent to disseminate. The implication is clear. If we were allowed to smell the blood and hear the screams which result from the decisions made by elected leaders of our democracies, instead of the web of lies and moralising spun by their propagandists, we would have no stomach for the fight and no conscience that could justify it.
In the streets and in the hospitals Anderson found the indecency to match the Iraq war. "A great sobbing erupted. I saw two children, a brother and sister, being covered up by attendants on a gurney where they lay together. Before the cloth covered her, I saw that the girl was covered in blood. Her brother looked as though he were sleeping. But they both were dead. Their mother was there, beside herself with grief. She was the woman I had heard wailing and hitting the walls. Then almost all the onlookers around the mother, including the doctors and nurses, broke down and cried. I was overcome and went outside and sat down. I wept. The children's father was sitting a few feet away from me, disconsolately sobbing into his arms."
War begins but it never ends. The victors get to write the story. The losers suffer the consequences. The rest of us just move on. The abstractions of freedom, democracy, sacrifice, are sprinkled like holy water to cleanse the memory and heal the wounds inflicted on the consciences of the footsoldiers who visited death on the innocent, and to prepare another generation of killers for the next noble cause. In the tales of heroism written by generals and screened by networks safely embedded in armoured vehicles, brutality is sanitised, crimes are brushed out or pinned on "bad apples", and the war ends when the commander-in-chief swoops down to an aircraft carrier and declares it so. Humpty Dumpty never had it so easy.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
The Fall of Baghdad By Jon Lee Anderson Little Brown, 389pp. £20