President George W. Bush, like the vast majority of the American public, knows war primarily through the cinematic lens. “Rambo,” “Delta Force,” and a host of other movies oozing self-righteous machismo present war as a football match pitting good guys against bad. The daily misery of war as lived experience does not make the final editing cut in Hollywood.

On screen, the decisive battle comes and goes in a flash, the hero emerges triumphant, no innocents are scarred or damaged, and everyone goes home happy and proud. This is war as fought and won by gods, which most Americans, especially our leaders, consider themselves to be, particularly after the collapse of the USSR. Since 1991, we have been the main attraction: The Superpower, The Sole Leader of the World, The Strongest People on the Planet. What we say, goes.

After living in the Middle East for most of the last six years, I am continually taken aback by this characteristically American hubris. Sadly, even those earnest war protesters waving placards and shouting slogans before the White House seem supremely self-confident to my eyes, eyes that have seen war. I envy the protesters’ easy assumption that the values, beliefs, and principles that they hold dear can possibly halt the gears of war–and war’s commerce–already set in motion, now virtually unstoppable.

Two years ago, while living in Lebanon, I had my first taste of war. It is a metallic taste, a bitter taste of repressed sorrow, rage, and fear that can neither be swallowed nor vomited. These corrosive emotions stick in your throat day after endless day. And I only saw 16 days of war: the Israeli assault on Lebanon code-named “Grapes of Wrath.” That was enough time for me to learn how war disrupts your digestion, your schedule, and your relationships. Tempers flare, sleep evaporates, and concentration disintegrates.

War also upsets your assumptions and expectations. I learned what it meant to be powerless, at the mercy of the merciless. I saw that innocents could be slaughtered with impunity while the outside world yawned with indifference. I learned how cheap was the life of anyone within range of the Israeli Air Force, whose jets, like maddened hornets, shrieked and whined angrily over our heads threatening death and destruction every moment of every day. My brief experience of war left me awed by the strength of people in Lebanon, who had survived 16 years of unrelenting terror, helplessness, and chaos with their sense of humor and joie de vivre intact.

When I first moved to Lebanon in 1993, I mistakenly assumed I wouldn’t be seeing any military action. Feeling safely distant from the war that had destroyed Beirut, but curious about how it started, I often talked with a friend about how she had experienced the Lebanese war as a child. Hanady, a journalist and the daughter of a respected Beiruti newspaper editor, was only seven years old when the war began. At its end, she was 24, but looked older.

“Was there a moment when you knew, as a small child, that the war had begun?” I asked her one evening as we watched the sun set over the Mediterranean. “Yes,” she answered quietly, with a pensive look in her green eyes. I expected a dramatic tale to pour forth: soldiers fighting in the streets, tanks at her window, bombs falling in her garden.

But instead, Hanady said “I knew that something awful was happening when I came home one afternoon and found my father standing in the middle of the street talking to some men, and he was wearing his bathrobe and bedroom slippers.” This small disruption of normality–her fashionable father allowing himself to be seen in terrycloth on Hamra Street–initiated her awareness of war. Hearing this, I had to stifle a laugh. It seemed so surreal.

My most enduring memory of “Grapes of Wrath” is not the day I sat typing at my computer in West Beirut, and wondered why my teeth and feet were vibrating, only to find myself suddenly shouting as the earth-splitting rumble of an explosion a mile and a half away shook my body.

Nor was it the knowing look in the eyes of my Palestinian colleague as she lit a cigarette with trembling hands and said, with a bitter smile that informed me I was now an initiate into the mysteries of modern warfare, “Shayfee…mitl al-infijaar byitla’ min batnik, mush haik?” (“You see? It’s like the explosion is coming from within your stomach, isn’t it?”).

It wasn’t scene after scene of carnage on the evening news: decapitated schoolgirls, crushed babies, burnt refugees, and wailing mothers. Nor was it the maggots which started to turn up in our fruits and vegetables, the natural result of a dramatic increase in Lebanon’s fly population due to the many carcasses of sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, and even people, which lay rotting in the fertile fields of south Lebanon.

It wasn’t even my father’s voice over the telephone, shaking with fear and rage as he begged my husband and me to come back to America, because he had just seen footage on CNN of the massacre at the UNIFIL base in Qana: “Sweet Jesus! There are burnt babies in the arms of dead mothers! The Israelis have gone insane; they might throw everything they have at you, maybe even their nukes! Please come home now!”

And it wasn’t the Israeli mirage Jet which suddenly streaked past my kitchen window, with a violent roar like a bullet tearing through steel, so close I could see the pilot as I dove onto the floor and screamed. And later cried, as I realized that the jet had been on its way to bomb people into smithereens in Baalbek, and there was nothing I could possibly do to stop this or any of the other daily murders.

No, my most vivid memory of the short war I witnessed in Lebanon is as surreal as Hanady’s memory of the earlier, much longer, war. There was a song that was popular on the radio that April, a haunting song by Joan Osborne entitled “What if God was One of Us?”. It first caught my attention the day my husband and I were trapped in a massive traffic jam as everyone tried to escape Beirut after the first Israeli air assault on the city in fourteen years.

It was a hot day for early April, and the song wafted from one car radio to the next through countless open windows, like the sardonic background music of our predicament, a mocking indictment of how very un-godlike we all were at that moment, scurrying like cockroaches fearful of being crushed by a large foot coming down from the sky.

Three days later, we opened the windows at my office because of the unusually warm weather, even though we knew that the roar of the circling Israeli jets would only be that much more aggravating. As we did so, a student in a nearby dorm room blasted music out of her window, filling the eerily empty streets with that theme song again: “If God had a face/what would it look like? And would you want to see/ If seeing meant/that you would have to believe?”

And it occurred to me that the problem was that some of us did indeed think that God was one of us, or, more precisely, that some of us were gods: God’s Chosen People were smashing the Party of God in a very godless manner.

Today I played my Joan Osborne tape and listened to that song again. As music so mysteriously does, it brought back memories and feelings with surprising intensity. I began to tremble and cry as the lyrics asked their plaintive question about our likeness to God, or lack thereof. I cried not from sorrow, but because I am helpless before what may be coming, not only in Iraq, but also throughout the entire Middle East. I trembled because so many people may die while George and Saddam play God with others’ lives, and because it seems that none of us can stop it: The gods of war have decided.

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Laurie originally wrote this piece in 1998. With her permission we substituted the words George W. Bush for Bill Clinton and could see no signs that it was written over four years ago. The Piece was originally published in the National Catholic Reporter.

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