War is mainly a man’s game. Men like Osama Bin Laden send men like Muhammad Atta to bomb a New York building. Men like George Bush and Tony Blair react like, well like men, and take it out on men like Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein by sending young men to dodge bullets and iuds in a real video-game scenario. Men like Nouri al-Maliki are purple-fingered into a Green Zone political club so that mostly men can wear uniforms or hide bombs in order to kill other men, as well as women and children. Even a pacifist like Jesus predicted no end to war and rumors of war.
Everyone, not just men, suffers in the manly game of war. But while some men think it honorable to kill others, the burden of war probably hits women harder than anyone else. Suicide bombs are as likely to tear apart female bodies as male bodies, as able to cut short the life of a child as trump the survival of the elderly. In Iraq we see the blood smears that mark death and hear the mourning that haunts the grieving of the left behind. But beyond the battlefield and the car-blown open markets the exercise of war bears more fruit, one that harks back to the forbidden fruit in the innocence of Eden. Continue reading The Forbidden Fruit of the Iraq War