Is there life beyond war and the general election?

War has become the one issue that the international media are concentrating totally upon. Ever since the American President and the British prime minister sent a coalition of their armed forces to make war on Iraq, round-the-clock news stations like Sky and the BBC World Service have broadcast nothing but images of war. The radio stations, at least, spice their similar one-dish menu with interviews with various analysts and commentators. So do the Italian television stations.

The constant projection of bombing and aggression to a world public that is growing increasingly disgusted but is still mesmerised by it, makes one wonder what it is that is being sunk deep into our consciousness. Bush and Blair, particularly the former, spout pious repetitive declarations that theirs is a war of liberation. It is fast emerging that it is no such thing. Even if it were, it cannot be ignored that of all the peoples oppressed by domestic tyrants, the Anglo-American axis has zoned onto the country whose oil supplies are so attractive.

Nor can the thought be discounted that the axis, conspicuous by its failure to liberate the Palestinians from the injustice of Israeli occupation of much of what is meant to be their land, to get Israel to respect the authority of the United Nations as unambiguously expressed in various resolutions, is bent on ringing the zone with puppet governments.

Such possibilities are looked into on those radio and TV stations that bother to expand their coverage of the attack on Iraq. They are practically ignored by other stations. In the main, these assault world consciousness with reports from what have become known as 'embedded' journalists. These are men and women who accompany Anglo-American forces through their attacks and drive forward in preparation of further military strikes.

It is not that such journalists, who risk life and limb, as already confirmed by tragic examples, are themselves puppets or deliberate mouthpieces of the military forces. They are, nevertheless, far too close to them, part of their environment, in fact, to be able to send out searching reports and analyses.

Misinformation is practised by all powers, particularly when they are at war. The can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein, directly and through his minions, constantly misinforms the Iraqi people. There can be no doubt either that misinformation, one way or another, is being transmitted to the watching world. This is evident even in the case of the ultimate horror of loss of life, by tragic accident, by what is euphemistically called 'friendly fire', or at the hands of the enemy.

Coalition spokesmen spent hours denying the coalition had suffered any casualties, when the news broke early in the attack that some soldiers had died, and others had been taken prisoner.

Iraqi authorities played, and continue to play, a blatant and unsavoury propaganda game with coalition victims of war, parading bodies or prisoners on television to tarnish and deflate the coalition projection of itself as invincible.

Anglo-American spokesmen put out their own type of spin. They hide or delay the truth about casualties. They constantly try to give the impression that the Iraqi people - if the term can be used in its full meaning, given the different religious shades that deeply divide them among Shiite and Sunni Muslims - are waiting for the invading forces with open arms, that Iraqi soldiers are prepared to lay down their arms at the first whiff in the air suggesting that American or British forces are heading in their direction.

Is there life beyond the war, in its 11th day this Sunday, which will surely not be a day of rest? Surely, there is. It is a life that is becoming more terrible, though not as yet as bad as the death tally of war, including journalists and Iraqi civilians. It is reflected in the changing mood among some of those who bitterly hate Saddam Hussein.

Two doctors, interviewed on the BBC radio world service, articulated the shift in the wake of a coalition attack that killed their brethren. Missiles do not distinguish between Saddam haters and lovers.

It is reflected in the humanitarian disaster that many of those opposed to the war - and an untimely, UN defying one at that - was waiting to happen, and is duly happening. It is seen in the increasing recognition of the hypocrisy that lies in condemnations, justified though they may be, of the way Saddam Hussein's regime seems to flout the Geneva Convention with its exploitation of coalition military personnel who died, were killed, or taken prisoner.

Life can be seen in the reaction of an American father to the death of his son - in an accident, not at the hands of the enemy. He told George W. Bush, "Mr President, I had one son and you took him away from me. I'll never forgive you that". In the reaction of an American wounded in one of the attacks on Nasiriyah, who said the axis military forces had been told to expect little resistance, but then found out "it was a far different ball game over there."

There is life in the need to continue with normal activity. In the fact that such a need is itself threatened by the war. The International Monetary Fund warned on Thursday that the war could push a fragile world economy into recession. A bad situation - with economic growth in America, Germany and Britain under pressure, and Japan already in recession - is being made worse.

There is life in the sense that, though the 24-hour news stations only report the war in Iraq, elsewhere people continue to laugh and cry, to work or worry where the next dollar, lira, euro, rupee, dinar, tomorrow's meal is coming from. The wretched of the earth will be less so because the Anglo-American axis will soon arrive in Baghdad.

Those who are not ruled by a democratically elected government, or who live in sham democracies, will not be liberated because the axis effects regime change in Iraq Because it installs a military commander, a civilian administrator and prepares to juxtapose its brand of democracy on a part of the world it can never truly understand or control, as is being made evident by Turkey's design on the Kurdish north of Iraq.

World hunger will not be alleviated because President Bush hands contracts to American companies to rebuild (with Iraqi funds and with $3.5 billion out of a war budget of $75 billion, and rising) what their missiles and Saddam Hussein's self-destruct madness have blown to smithereens. Nor because buddies of the Bush administration are among the main beneficiaries and maybe, just maybe, shall throw morsels to British, Italian and Spanish sub-contractors, and to a well chosen kernel of Iraqi businesspeople.

There is life beyond the attack on Iraq. Criminals go on living it. They have not called a halt to their activities so that they can cleanse and reform themselves and be reborn as shining examples of goodness and virtue. Nor have those who grow, mix, and push drugs taken a sabbatical to try their hands at late learning to take up some noble pursuit.

There is always life, of some form or another. But there is much destruction and death too, despite the warnings and pleas of the Pope and other religious leaders. And it is continuing. At least, nauseating though the round-the-clock international television stations have become with their morbid concentration on just one issue, they do not let us forget that the horror continues.

In time they may also show the world the full effect, the manner in which - with the burden of guilt resting heavily on the shoulders of Saddam Hussein, and on Bush and Blair the responsibility for resorting to military action without exhausting the avenues of diplomacy - swathes of Iraq have been reduced to a waste land. And that might lead some of us to ponder on what T.S. Eliot in his epic poem by that name:

What are the roots clutch what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

These are bad times. They could grow worse, for us too, though we do not seem to realise that, obsessed as we are with our own one single issue.