SPEACH

ZMAG: The Day Of The Jackals by Arundhati Roy


Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words?

And now the bombs have fallen, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilization.

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawled colorful messages in childish handwriting: "For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse."

A building went down. A market place. A home. A girl who loved a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother’s marbles.

On the 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 A.J. said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."