The invasion of Iraq began two weeks after our daughter's first birthday. It was launched with "shock and awe" -- 1700 jets, 500 of them armed with cruise missiles, lighting up the Baghdad sky. The strikes, we were told, were "surgical." That is, every effort was made to avoid civilian casualties.
While the bombs were dropping that first night on Iraq, it was day here in New York. An unusually warm day for March, with a high in the 60s. I took our daughter to the playground, and, as I would for the next few years, I pushed her on the swings high enough so she screamed with delight, high enough so she seemed to enter the sky.
And, for the first time, I thought something that would haunt me almost every time I pushed her swing during the presidency of George W. Bush -- bafflement that the same sky raining bombs on Iraq was peaceful over Central Park. Why was that? Why would no bombs drop on my child? Does American birth confer some special blessing on our daughter? Or is it just luck that she was born in a country where bombs don't land on playgrounds and wedding parties?
I understand. War is war. But there's something about killing kids...
I once worked on a film about photographers, among them Gilles Peress. We had collaborated once, on a story about a lynching of a teenager in Mississippi, and Gilles had gone out and taken photographs of men I was afraid to call on the phone -- I had enormous admiration for him. So when we filmed him shortly after he returned from Rwanda, I was unsurprised by the ugly power of his images. One confused me. "This pair of child's pajamas -- what's going on here?" I asked. "There's a child in there," he said. But there was no head. No hands. No feet. "They cut them off so the spirit can't return in another life and get revenge," he said, and then there was a long and godawful silence in the room, the director and I simply unable to speak, Gilles' mouth trembling.
I felt like that for most of the Iraq War: silent, disturbed, isolated. Not that I went to see it firsthand. There was no need -- civilian casualties tend to be generic. They are also, no matter what governments say, the real point of war. Ever since Dresden and Hiroshima, as Chris Hedges points out in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, we win wars less by defeating enemy soldiers than by breaking a nation's will to fight. There's no better way to do that than by killing women and children.
As 2010 begins, I am plunged into a fresh gloom. I watched my wife gut our coffers to help elect Barack Obama, and I shared with her and most of you the hope for our nation's reclamation that his election promised: the end of the war, the return to the rule of law, a helping hand to the needy. It is a measure of the discount I've taken on those hopes that I have -- with some of the same "pragmatism" that infects the president and his advisers -- decided that more American soldiers and more Afghani civilians must die, not because their deaths will lead to a happy result for Afghanistan, but because the surest way for a president of the Democrat persuasion to destroy his career is to withdraw our soldiers from this hellhole.
But wouldn't it be nice if -- like the Christmas Armistice of 1914 -- the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq simply stopped. Not for long; we wouldn't want anyone to think we had declared peace. But a truce that lasted a day, that wouldn't rock the world.
A day, I think, would be long enough for fathers in other countries to grasp again how it feels to play outside with their children without fear of dying under an American bomb. If it made them think better of us and less well of Al-Qaeda, all the better. But my New Year's wish is more modest. Just the briefest taste of freedom will do -- not the "freedom" we think is so important to bring to other nations that we're willing to kill their people to achieve it, but the simplest of freedoms. The sun. The sky. The laughter of children. Everything my daughter takes for granted.