So today Des Browne faces his critics. Can the fluffy-haired defence secretary satisfactorily answer the charges about his behaviour in the crucial hours leading up to the sale of British sailors' stories to newspapers? Will the Tories boldly go one step further and demand his resignation? Will the prime minister, in his final weeks in office, dispense with Des? A nation holds its breath for the answer.Oh no it bloody doesn't. I certainly don't. What I feel is a rising sense of disgust that anyone is so pathetically interested in this third-rate and comparatively trivial story. It doesn't matter whether Des Browne makes a good fist of it in the Commons. I can't believe that David Cameron thought it worth his while to get so steamed up about it at the weekend. Nor can I stomach the self-important newspaper vapourings from retired generals about it all being a poor show, and a damned disgrace, and that feller Blair ... For the sake of accuracy and completeness, let me also add that I don't care a fig about Des Browne himself.
What matters is the disaster. What matters is the blood dripping into the sand, day after day, week after week. What matters is the obvious thing, the hideous civil war destroying Iraq, and the murders and the bombings, and our complicity in that. What can have happened to us that we are so interested, instead, in the chain of command that led to two junior service people being paid to publish rather uninteresting accounts of their bloodless abduction and return? The looming crisis with Iran is certainly important. Our attitude to their nuclear programme is, too. The politics of the seizure of the British personnel matters. But a tiny spat among self-obsessed media and political players in Westminster does not.
Isn't this what the psychologists call displacement - the elevation of something trivial to block out something important? In his BBC television interview yesterday, the whole Iraqi catastrophe was dismissed by Tony Blair in a couple of sentences. Nothing left to report, nothing more to say?
With the exception of a few newspapers, and a few of the best broadcast journalists, the disaster has been elbowed to the edge of the agenda. You know that often-changing "breaking news" strapline that appears at the bottom of 24-hour TV news shows? Well that's where, these days, Iraq's carnage tends to sit. Day in, day out, another car-bombing, assassination, roadside blast or kidnapping ticks past, a kind of horrible ever-present mutter that never changes, never goes away. The killing is so bad it is mostly relegated to a news drain that gurgles on. Just sometimes, the event is so spectacular - a main bridge destroyed, the attack on the Iraqi parliament - that it makes the main screen.
Broadcasters are well aware of the problem. Here is something so big and so relentless, it drives their viewers away. They want to be responsible. The BBC and ITV will do special Iraq weeks, to highlight the continuing carnage, before turning with relief to easier-on-the-eye subjects that will keep their numbers up. But even when we do see something of the reality, the pictures seem always the same. There are the weeping women running towards the camera, the oily black smoke curling up in the middle distance, the chaos of ambulances and the angrily gesturing people.
They don't show the cuts of human meat littering the streets, or the hands, feet or heads lying by themselves at the side of the road. They don't show children with holes in their bellies, screaming with pain. As a former TV journalist myself, I used to strongly defend this kind of censorship. It was unnecessary to show everything, I thought, a kind of pornography of violence that damaged the viewer for no obvious purpose. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe we should be shown these things, just to shock us into taking another look at Iraq and thinking again about what can be done.
As a notorious sceptic about aspects of the blogosphere, I have to say that, in the case of Iraq, the web has provided a heroic and essential counterweight to traditional media. There are websites devoted to painstaking and unflinching counting of what happens there.
Take the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (icasualties.org), which confines itself to collating news reports and is therefore, it says itself, undercounting. Look just at reports from yesterday morning. There was the British helicopter crash. And 37 people were reported dead after a car-bomb attack on a bus station; a US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb; a suicide bomber blew himself up in a minibus in Baghdad, killing at least nine; five "suspected insurgents" were killed in Basra, then another four, by the Iraqi army; four people were killed by suicide bombers in Mosul; gunmen killed a police colonel and another policeman in Baiji; a group linked to al-Qaida abducted 20 Iraqi troops and policemen; Baghdad police said they had found 19 bodies around the capital; another two policemen were killed in Baghdad; four bodies were found in Mosul, two of them decapitated. I haven't listed the wounded because it would take the rest of this page.
Another site, Iraq Body Count, which assesses the number of civilians killed by military intervention at between 61,391 and 67,364, carries a useful and harrowing week-by-week assessment by Lily Hamourtziadou - a look back, so it's a little out of date. In the first week of April, she says, around 550 civilians were killed, including at least 32 children. She quotes a teacher at Mosul orphanage on her charges: "Some scream at night, others cannot speak ... There are those that try to imagine their families are still alive and will come to get them, even though they have seen them die. There are fears that these children will start to hate society and will join armed groups and form gangs as soon as they are old enough."
And so it goes on, the nine young girls killed leaving their classroom; the teenager killed by mortars playing football; the body of an 11-year-old boy found with his throat cut; the nine university students ambushed and shot dead; the 54 people found bound, dead and tortured. "Wednesday 4 April is the quietest day of the week, as there are only 49 civilian deaths reported ..."
We have made this situation, rolled out the pitch on which civil war and terrorism are being played out, and have failed to find any way of binding the wounds we opened. The answers are hard, expensive, and possibly humiliating - they certainly involve dialogue with the Iranians. But that's what the Commons should be debating today, not Des Browne and his stupid inquiry.
Jackie Ashley