An act of cowardice unrivalled in history

Arundhati Roy, author of the novel The God of Small Things, is, I believe, the freshest voice on Earth. She says the obvious, which is only obvious after she says it. For antiwar Americans who want to take heart, her generosity towards the "bravery" of our efforts is moving and her comments on the deviousness of the "natives" classic. This war, she insists, is "an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history." At the end of her piece she offers a ray of hope relating to the stupidity of our homegrown imperialists, a subject that I'll take up tomorrow in relation to another essay. Tom

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

By Arundhati Roy
The Guardian
April 2, 2003

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks….

To read more Roy (which you must) click here