Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a war.

This is no far-removed Yugoslavian air campaign, nor is it a simple corrective trip through the badlands of Afghanistan. The Taliban were always a little on the stupid side when it came to things like battle or how to treat a woman.

However, in Iraq, we have an adversary who knows a little more about military tactics and survival at all costs, and he and the bumbling Bush boys have combined forces to present us with a bona fide bloodbath in the making.

It will be a war. And there will be, as there has been in all wars, carnage.

You can turn the television on and watch the bombs fall live on Baghdad.

The bombs are spectacular, just like in the movies. What you will very rarely see, however, are the people who get blown up by those bombs.

One place you can see those people is at www.thememoryhole.org. The Memory Hole has collected images of the war from organizations such as Reuters, the Associated Press, Abu Dhabi TV and even the journalistically questionable Al-Jazeera, which is the Middle East's version of Fox News. These images of the recently bombed have been generally missing in action on Western news networks.

In the Memory Hole's Gulf War II archives, there are three shots of a boy, around the age of 5, with the top of his head blown off and his face in tatters.

There is another image of an older man sitting in the dust and covered in his own blood, his legs splayed out in front of him as he stares despondently at his hands in his lap.

There are the now-infamous photos of American and British casualties, including those prisoners of war who appear to have been executed.

There are shots of mothers crying over their children.

And there are, as you would expect, many dead Iraqi soldiers.

These are the true images of war. It has been said that a picture without a person in it is meaningless, and that truism is magnified a thousand times in war. Those huge fireballs blossoming across Iraq are only half the truth.

These images of the dead and bleeding are the ultimate truth of war, and they shock and awe more than any barrage of Massive Ordinance Air Blast bombs ever could.

It is important that you see these images and understand them as the first rule of war: There will be suffering, and much of it will be needless.

The Geneva Conventions add to the rules of war from time to time, seeking to civilize the way nations go about trying to destroy one another.

We have Iraqi soldiers dressing as civilians or faking surrender under white flags, and then attacking, a clear violation of the rules of war.

They have executed prisoners of war, another violation.

However, for the Bush team to cry foul about the Iraqis not playing fairly suggests a certain naïveté about war, and especially the way they wage war in the Middle East. When you have a tyrant cornered, and have declared your intent to depose him, and kill him if necessary, you should expect that he will fight like a wounded animal. Do not expect him, especially Saddam, to follow the rules of war.

Once upon a time, there were no rules of war. War was just that - war.

Brutal, violent and lawless, as it should be. What you are trying to do in a war is kill as many men and women as possible in as short a time as possible; pound your enemy into the ground; demoralize him; break him; take his land, his people, his resources; humiliate him; and finally destroy him.

The international rules of war were drawn up to make it all seem nicer somehow.

But I can think of no grosser contradiction of terms than the phrase, "the rules of war between civilized nations."

The only true rule of war, aside from the law of suffering, is that once you start shooting at each other, civilization has failed, and there are no rules.

So now, in Iraq, we have a real war shaping up, with much bombing and shooting and bleeding and crying and wailing, and suffering, as seen on The Memory Hole.

Another rule of war is that you do not stop the war because of it. But you should see it, and understand it, and most of all remember it. That way, the next time someone tries to start a war, especially a pre-emptive, untimely, unnecessary one, more of you will remember the boy with the top of his head blown off, and tell our leaders that war really is the last resort.

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