The costs of war

This war will go on for some time. It will not be pretty; no war ever is. We will kill many innocents and alienate many sympathetic hearts. We will commit atrocities. Our troops will never be the same.

I cannot blog this every day. I can barely look at the photos. So I'm going to collect a big heap of angst and sorrow into one place, and that place is here.
I'll leave to the bigger news blogs the stories of our razing one major city after another. Or fleeing civilians, or defaced mosques, or the hateful glee of warbloggers watching it all happen. Instead I'll just leave you with these images clipped from Picasso's huge antiwar masterpiece Guernica, and with this poem by Harold Pinter, written for this war (in 2003):

God Bless America

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

(via wood s lot)