Baghdad Blast

Courtesy of the BBC, here are some photos from the Baghdad marketplace explosion that you won't see on American TV.

War photography has a way of cutting through all the spin (or propaganda, as it used to be called) and revealing war for what it is to those most affected--not some distant "operation," but a miasma of blood and screams and unbearable grief.

It reminds me of a line from a Tina Turner song called "Steel Claw":

"I don't care who's right, who's wrong, it really doesn't matter when you're lying in the gutter."

I saw a documentary film last night about Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees she studies (still!) in Tanzania. One of her most suprising and disheartening discoveries, she said, was that groups of chimps make war on each other, and an entire group is sometimes exterminated. Maybe we haven't learned much in the last billion years.