It would take a heart of stone not to feel sorry for Lil Bigley, mother of British hostage, Ken, who collapsed after a press conference last week. Like everyone else, I hope that she makes a full recovery and that she will yet see her son alive again.
But why is it that I know her name and that of her son? Because, even here in far away Korea, a lot of the media which I digest each day comes from British sources (the best in the world in my humble opinion). Naturally, the British media give greater coverage to events in Iraq when British lives are at stake. There's nothing wrong or immoral about this. Over here, when Kim Sung Il was taken hostage a few months ago, the newspapers and TV spoke of little else as the tragedy unfolded.
If like me, you get a lot of your information about the war from Britsh sources, then you're bound to become more familiar with British suffering than Iraqi suffering or American suffering. So, to me, Ken Bigley is not just another number, another gim statistic; he is a human being with a name and a mother. The level of coverage of his capture has humanised him for me. What were the names of the two Americans who were taken captive along with Mr. Bigley and have since been beheaded? Can't remember. Are their mothers still alive to have to suffer this horrible experience? No idea.
We should never lose sight of the fact that every victim of this war, from whatever country, hasa name. Every last one of them has a family who misses them terribly. Ian Paisley, not a man I usuually quote approvingly, put it well when he said "there's no difference between Protestant tears and Catholic tears". As for Northern Ireland, so for Iraq.
Yet some of those who now say, no doubt genuinely, that they feel for Mr. Bigley's family, have nothing to say about the suffering of thousands of Iraqi families. Is there no room in their minds for a few thoughts for the thousands of Iraqi mothers who've lost children during this conflict?
For some, it seems that the answer is no. Listening to some of the hawkish rhetoric, one is frankly appalled by the lack of humanity. Those who cooed from their armchairs as the US unleashed "shock and awe" over Baghdads last March ought to be ashamed of themselves. What they were watching was not some made for TV fireworks display, but an act of war in which human beings were killed.
Those who died that day, and every single day since then, were human just as much as Mr. Bigley. Every one of them had loved ones who were expecting them home but never saw them again. This applies just as much to those killed in US "precision" strikes in Fallujah as it does to victims of the insurgency, the many hundreds of people who have earned the unwanted epithet "innocent bystander" after some suicide bomb.
Death is what happens in war, every single time without exception. It is an iron law. In war, people die, and other people grieve fo those who have died. Thousands of years of experience of this, finally drummed it into our thick skulls that war=bad. So in the latter part of the last century, in the shadow of the worst war of all, we finally began to use other means to resolve our differences. While war could never be ruled out altogether, it was seen as a last resort, only to be used when all other avenues had been explored. This new attitude was not universally shared, but it was a start.
Whatever progress humanity made towards a remotely civilised world has been undone by Blair, Bush et al with their war of choice against a phantom menace in Baghdad. War is now no longer a last resort, but rather, in White House Chief of Staff Andy Card's chilling words, "a product". As a result of this "product" we have, with utter inevitability, thousands of weeping mothers. In Liverpool, in Atlanta, in Fallujah.
The men who inflict this grief reside, not only in the backstreets of Baghdad, but also in the corridors of power in London and Washington.