"Terrifying film of women and children later emerged after Reuters and the Associated Press were permitted by the Iraqi authorities to take their cameras into the town. Their pictures - the first by Western news agencies from the Iraqi side of the battlefront - showed babies cut in half and children with amputation wounds, apparently caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs.
Much of the videotape was too terrible to show on television and the agencies' Baghdad editors felt able to send only a few minutes of a 21-minute tape that included a father holding out pieces of his baby and screaming "cowards, cowards" into the camera."
[From: 2003/04/04: Independent(UK): Children killed and maimed in bomb attack on town ]
I have spent time lately looking at Goya's Disasters of War. Sketched between 1810 - 1820, the Disasters depict the cruelty and horror of the Spanish Insurrection of 1808 and the later Napoleonic Peninsular War. Nowadays the monsters sit behind desks and go home to their wife and kids when their shift is done, but they are no less monsters.
As long as humans are capable, they will be capable of great creativity and great destruction. How is this ever going to end?
In all likelihood it isn't. The history of homo sapiens is a history of war and depradation. There is something in the human psyche which exults in the spirit of the hunter unleashed. This is not likely to change anytime soon -- unless something fundamental changes.
The developments of technology -- one hesitates to say progress -- which created weapons which are capable of wiping out all life on the planet, did not do the trick. It may be that wrapping all humanity in an electronic net, enabling person to person communication across cultures and boundaries, will in time do the trick. It is too early yet to tell, however the early signs are not promising.
There may be other more or less dramatic developments. Certainly there will be more deadly weapons, and in an age of asymetric warfare, there may be unexpected turn arounds.
For those of us who grew up in the security bubble since the Second World War these are unsettling times. Once again the eagle of global domination is spreading its wings and none of us is safe anymore.
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