KEY POINTS:
For me, the Iraqi Civil War began last Thursday. I am no Iraqi scholar or military expert. I've never been to their country, let alone reported from it. But when I read the paper the next morning, I felt sure that civil war had begun just then.
Two pictures told me so; no words, just images.
Last week, when 215 people were killed by car bombs and another several hundred wounded, the New York Times published a photo of a bereft woman sitting beside several blanket-draped bodies, family members lying on the ground dead.
It was the first time in months, if not years, that an image of this war finally put me in her place. I have a daughter, a son, and a husband. I tried to imagine how she would get up again.
Several days later, after the revenge killing was in full swing, the New York Times published a photo of another woman holding the hand of her dead son. In her grief, she had smeared his blood over her entire face, on her cheeks and forehead and chin. The red of new death had dried into a colourless blackened stain.
I stared at that second photo with more acuity than I want to admit. Just for a moment, I read the news and couldn't turn the page.
For once, it was no longer news. It was a woman; a woman living and grieving and watching her loved ones die around her as her country collapses. For maybe a minute, I shut out what I know best, the words on the page.
The story told me how many died that day (47 in her city alone), and where the fighting took place (his body lay outside a hospital morgue in Baquba).
If I wanted to, I could read a handful of other stories that told me the subtext of what I was seeing, analysing endless moves on the political chessboard. That is what the news teaches.
It is how we learn to think about the politics of war. It is also how we learn to not feel it. Analysis provides palatable distance, but at what cost?
How did we, as readers and consumers of world affairs, allow the process of understanding news to so effectively deaden the reality of the story behind it?
What would make it come alive? I could tell you about six men coming out of mass at church in Parnell who were doused with kerosene and set on fire yesterday.
Or I could try to write a poignant profile piece of the 21 Waikato farmers - all from two extended families, including a 12-year-old - who were dragged from their homes by gunmen posing as police.
They were handcuffed, blindfolded, loaded on to pick-up trucks and shot before their bodies were dumped in two neighbouring houses in Cambridge.
Would that make the Iraqi war seem more real to you?
There was more that day, but on the real stage in Iraq. The night before, gunmen in more than 40 cars drove through a Sunni neighbourhood and shot at houses. A self-created neighbourhood army of 300 residents, who are now posted on rooftops and at street corners with AK47s, shot back. It happened again the next morning.
Two militiamen shot an electrician after an informant nodded in his direction. Half an hour later, when police arrived to investigate the crime, the same two militiamen who had committed the murder arrived with them.
Thirty Sunni families in one neighbourhood received letters from "the punishment committee" that warned them to "leave our country or we will punish you".
There were also 17 bodies found scattered around various areas of the city with bullet holes to the head. That was a Friday.
Just one day in Iraq. At least that is what made it into print in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Associated Press that day. Pawns moving around a deadly game board.
Is it impossible to make this kind of distance come home, to give it meaning beyond just shifting alliances and double-dealing politics, especially politics that are entangled so far from our shores? Have we forgotten how to see the people beyond the polemics?
For me, that one momentary glimpse of recognition - two photos - was worth more than any Perspectives page has given me in several years.
It is the bloodied face of the woman who lost her son that I will remember when I think of this war. And it is the woman sitting on the ground with the blanketed bodies of her loved ones next to her, bereft. I will forget the analysis of who was best served by the summit in Amman this week. I won't remember the tally of war dead or even the Iraqi leader's names in time.
But I will remember last Thursday.
In April, an Iraqi Sunni website, Rabita, began advising Sunnis to get fake IDs to hide their ethnicity. Today, according to the Washington Post, that same website has evolved. It now directs Sunnis to protect one's neighbourhood by putting snipers on the roof, planting roadside bombs at neighbourhood entrances, distributing grenades, and using small cars as bait so enemies will chase them into "the killing zones".
"Defend yourself." It begins, "The entire world around you is not concerned about what happens to you."
I turned the page to the next story. I'd already forgotten how to see the people of this civil war, one grieving face at a time.
