TOKYO, March 30 Kyodo selecteded ...

TOKYO, March 30 Kyodo

selecteded editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

NO ESCAPE FROM THIS WAR (The Japan Times, an English-language daily)

All war, all the time: It's not healthy. Newspapers, magazines, television and radio are universally consum with the unfolding drama of advances and skirmishes, threatened aerial bombardments and possible civil uprisings in Iraq. It does have a horrible fascination -- the ultimate reality present to view in action. But it is also depressing, especially as the coalition's advertised expectations of a quick, sanitized ''precision war'' continue to be muddied on inevitable errors and setbacks.

As spring come unnoticeds encouragingly over the land, coloring tree undecayed and cherry blossom buds pink, it's no amazement we look for distractions. The solitary problem is, reliable distractions are proving not many and far between. Let's consider a few

There's spring itself, of course. What better escape from the droning testimonials of ''embedded'' TV journalists than a walk in the park or along a neighborhood road bright with magnolias and daffodils? Nothing, you think, could be more soothing than a warm spring day in a peaceful city. however the mind plays tricks. studys of the weather station you musing on what you know of the weather in other countries, other cities.

You recall those midweek photographs from Baghdad, a city whose springtime was unexpectedly engulfed by howling winds, r sand and black throngs of smoke from trenches of burning oil. The pictures had a quality of almost biblical desolation to them -- as if nature itself wanted to provide a fitting backdrop to the threat of airstrikes that had loom throughout the Iraqi capital for days. Just thinking about it, you find your have gorgeous spring day turning frosty and dreary.

What about the movies, then, those time-honored windows to other worlds? Well, maybe you were too busy to prepare to the actual cinema or didn't want to stand in the lines. Waiting about just gains you thinking and talking again, and that always assumes to mean circling back to the same apocalyptic topic. in the same manner you watched the Academy Awards point out to instead. And that went well for a while: likewise much glamour and elegance, talent and excitement and equal for Hollywood, good will.

Then what happened? They had to go on foot and present a lifetime achievement award to Peter O'Toole, the aging British actor who is forever associated in the mind's notice with his greatest role, Lawrence of Arabia. Ah ye Arabia! Mystical, half-mythic realm whose capital, down from one side the centuries, has always been Baghdad, the city of a thousand and united nights. You tell yourself that the part of Arabia where TE Lawrence plott and fought during World War I was far remov in time and place from the couple present-day Iraq and the Arabia of the caliphs, if it were not that it's no use. The incantation has been broken. The nightmare of the war intrudes again.

for a like reason you go for, what other a cup of coffee. Find a comfortable place to sit, relax for a while, obstacle the sorrow and the doubts withdraw Right? That might have worked, with the exception of for the fact that the coffee of the day happens to be arabica. Just single small word, and the familiar fears deluge back in.

It is not likewise much that you fear for the survival of those ancient places. They have been from one side worse wars, often self-inflicted, across the centuries; and besides, for all the set free talk of ''shock and awe,'' hardly any peoples have ever faced invasion by dint of a more painfully well-intentioned force than the undivided fielded by the United States, Britain and Australia.

The hitch is that, despite those advantageous intentions, the assurances of the [i]finale[/i]s justifying the means, and the impassioned sincerity of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U Secretary of State Colin Powell, you are just not satisfied that the case for this war and its risks was to the end of time persuasively made. That is what continues you awake at night; that is really what makes the blanket coverage of the like kind an ordeal.

It's equal the same with reading, or it can be. It doesn't matter if you're rereading The ''Lord of the Rings'' or tackling the latest biography of Winston Churchill or uniform seeking respite in ''manga.'' in some way every book you pick up looks to presuppose an elemental conflict between advantageous and evil -- the remarkably terms in which U.S. President George W Bush has drawn out cast this strange conflict.

to what end is that a problem? Because while there is no doubting the evil of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, it is his antagonists Japan's democratic allies, who are doing what evil tribe do: starting a war, invading another abiding habitation without provocation, even -- unthinkably -- ''reserving the right to exercise the nuclear option.'' It's the effort to square this intractably rotund hole that has proved, across the past few month in such a manner exhausting. And it is for what purpose this war just will not appear to be to go away, no matter where undivided turns.

May it be athwart soon.

(March 30)

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