" I haven't seen many TV reporters standing in the ruins of Falluja, breathlessly describing how, in 30 years of reporting, they've never seen a human tragedy on this scale. The Pope hasn't appealed for everyone to remember the Iraqi dead in their prayers, and MTV hasn't gone silent in their memory.
Nor are Blair and Bush falling over each other to show they recognise the scale of the disaster in Iraq. On the contrary, they have been doing their best to conceal the numbers killed. "
We remember the Russian dead today in the fight against Hitler.
Britain and America would like us to forget Iraqi dead. They won't let us even count them.
I am trying to write a poem to complete the trilogy on Fallujah. A city of 300,000 people laid to waste to punish a community that felt no liberation when the Americans invaded and who dared to resist them.
This was an illegal war of agression. This was mass destruction. This was war crime.
I cannot come near to the full experience of this carnage. I can only compare it to the trees brought down in my local forest by the fierce winds of a planet that is drying out.
