KEY POINTS:
All I have to do is click on to my home computer and suddenly I'm there, inside war. This is no game. It is real, like television gone helter-skelter.
There are no filters, no news editors, no context. I don't know anything about what I'm seeing, I just
know I can't take my eyes off the screen.
I watch as a young, slightly overweight man with glasses smiles and jokes with the cameraman. There is an Arabic logo and titles against a backdrop of emotive, traditional singing.
He gets into a fairly nondescript car and the camera zooms in to a close-up of his face, relaxed and laughing. It pans to the seat beside him and we see explosives filling both the passenger side and the back foot well. He waves to the camera.
We cut to a military roadblock in the distance. His car enters the frame as we hear chanting by the cameraman get louder and louder.
The vehicle explodes on impact. The soundtrack swells. We see the fireball repeated in slow motion like a sports replay.
That was my first suicide bombing at the click of a mouse. Welcome to war, the home game edition.
I'm not alone. Millions are playing. James Harkin of the Financial Times writes of sitting at home watching an insurgent's camera pan the burned wreckage of a downed helicopter with 11 dead US contractors.
Just when he thought he'd seen enough, the camera discovers a wounded survivor lying in long grass. The wounded man thinks these men are bystanders and calls for help. In almost perfect English, the cameraman asks him to stand up. As he struggles to his feet, we watch as they execute him in a volley of rifle shots, chanting "Allah Akbar".
There is so much to choose from, footage from insurgents or the US. I can see an American soldier shoot an Iraqi civilian or watch an edited compilation of 25 insurgent car bomb explosions set to Public Enemy's Fight The Power.
You didn't see that on your TV this week because your neighbourhood news director decided that footage was inappropriate for prime time. And he was right.
He would have had to find a way to sanitise the video through editing and fit it into that evening's few minutes of international coverage he has to distil daily. He makes that decision for you every night. But now you have a choice. You can turn on your laptop.
If Iraq is our first real internet war, it won't be our last. Bloodied and dismembered body parts flying in near enough real time are here like Charles Manson TV.
Is this the dawning of a completely free press or the beginning of abandonment of moral decency?
Isn't it supposed to be my job, as a journalist, to pick my way through this sewage to celebrate freedom of speech? That's supposed to be my credo. But look what freedom's wrought - a secondary sideshow, war as pornography.
I can watch Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl or contractor Nick Berg beheaded with just a click of my mouse, as have 15 million people, according to the Financial Times.
And who's betting on how high that count will spike when Angelina Jolie opens in the movie playing Daniel Pearl's wife coming soon to a theatre near you?
What better way to top mainstream media's sanitised take on this dirty world than with the real thing just a mouse click away? And yet ...
To most New Zealanders, this war is an analytical affair of political cut and thrust they read in this newspaper's overseas commentary feeds. With that diet, how can you see it as anything less than another far away cardboard tragedy? There is no visceral or personal impact at stake.
Tell me, what is the first image of the Iraq war that comes to mind?
I'll wager half of you will say the wavering statue of Saddam as it was pulled down. Who, then, is doing us the service or disservice of teaching us how war should look?
Give George Dubya his due. He knows the power of seeing the ugly reality of his country's young men blown apart. Even pristine US flag-draped coffins of American soldiers are not allowed to be photographed on arrival in Delaware. Americans watch official portraits during a silent memorial at the end of the nightly news on PBS.
It is done in respect, but it is also holding murder out at arm's length so we cannot recognise its stench.
We have our news editors of good taste in the mainstream media to protect us in plastic wrap on one hand, and I'm usually grateful.
On the other hand - the one we are afraid to open - we have the impervious dealers of death on the internet, happy to offer up war's hell to shatter our protected sensibilities.
If we knew war was that ugly every night on the news, would we still wage it at the drop of a body bag?
Today there is no turning back. You have a choice that never existed to this extent even a decade ago. You must choose where you find your version of reality - even if it's only a mouse click away. Then live with the consequences.
