Jennifer Maiden

( US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed those European countries which opposed the US attack on Iraq as only 'Old Europe' ) Old Europe stared at her breakfast, buttered her croissant, sipped coffee which tasted like a gun and blinked her grey eyes to restore the sun. Old Europe grasped at the old A.J.P. Taylor line, 'but in politics the impossible always happens' more and more, hoped for example, that the fact that the 'plant' for weapons in Northern Iraq was shown on the BBC an empty ex-Media Centre, and miles away a plain village, hoping not to be bombed, because by mistake young Colin, who apparently mistook often, used its name at the UN as that of the 'plant', would be accepted as a fact and then protected, thought Old Europe as her France loved to protect facts, as her Germany to act, or her Belgium to be. But, she reflected, in doubt and in debt, the future is not an ally over the sea which just needs to be convinced but a masked soldier, dead to Agincourt, Darmstadt, Verdun, wanting oil and meat and not understanding how a continental breakfast keeps the blood in your head, your brain not your gut. Old Europe set her spine straight in the doorway sun. Her hand crumbled bread as if it were old bone.

(' Operation Iraqi Freedom ') It felt odd from the start, this war. At the start, the 'death' of Saddam when Baghdad was bombed, but he's not dead, a bizarre Zapata, and then the Scuds fired at  Kuwait but they weren't Scuds, the 'chemical weapons of mass destruction factory',  with earth banks and barbed wire which wasn't one, however, and the 'column of tanks destroyed leaving Basra' which was three tanks, the endless 'securing' of towns and cities which aren't secure even allowing for the distinction that 'secure' does not mean 'safe', the 'Uprising' in Basra which no one could find there... Once there were poems in inverted commas, this is a war of inverted commas. Once I wrote that 'poems about poems don't seem as abstract as they once did' (although you don't need quotes, quoting yourself) and the Oxford Companion decided this meant I was no longer being abstract,  when in fact I meant that poems about poems (in that case partly a child) are not abstract because the abstract in them works through to a deeper real. Will this war work through to the deeper real at last? Now it seems again, however, that it feels odd, this war. I have paid it careful attention for almost a fortnight and what I would note here is that singular oddness of feeling it evokes: one is always at a tangent to it somehow, albeit with despair's edgy wit. The deaths have black solidity, as if from method, no white napalm suddenness...I thought: is it farce encoring tragedy, but there is too much earnest passion in the evil, and one watches that eros like watching spiders breed: 'It is what they do on this planet,' as a child's science fiction exercise might observe. Spiders feed in street windows broken by children's bones flying, but the US polls say yes: who want this so much. Who know what they do and also that they want those inverted commas, George- Bush-as-by-George-Orwell.            Is the US need for war not 'a way to teach Americans geography' as Bierce is often quoted, but a greed for abstractions: for the abstract, rather, not met by food or sex or fashion, by any intimate geography but this? But then the abstract is not the inverted commas, either, and it is those they want: the quotes which in two days will expire, the world left gasping with winded logic, the new skulls on dresses in the marketplace, damp empty dusty shoes. Günter Grass called this a 'wanted war' and perhaps that desire accounts for the oddncss of feeling: the animal impossibility of communication. In a damp concrete corner in the market, one's self-sense crouches close, alert for friendly fire.