Second World War

The Second World War is invoked in a passage dated February 1991 as a historical measure for the bombing of Iraq during the Gulf War. It gives the narrator’s account of a distant conflict a concrete, devastating scale, while marking a limit to the analogy: wartime uncertainty resembles the uncertainty of passion, but leaves no room for fantasy.

Historical Comparison in 1991

The narrator records that the expected conflict between Iraq and the Western coalition has broken out. Propagandists call it a clean war, but a report in that evening’s edition of Le Monde says Iraq has already received more bombs than the whole of Germany during the Second World War. The comparison makes the scale of the new bombing legible by setting it against the destruction of an earlier war; it also exposes the dissonance between the reassuring label and the reported facts.

The passage places that numerical comparison beside eyewitness claims about children stumbling through the streets of Baghdad, deafened by explosions. It does not elaborate on the Second World War itself or specify which period of bombing is being compared. Instead, the earlier war functions as a stark historical benchmark within a present-tense account of violence and its human consequences.

Uncertainty and Its Limits

As the narrator waits for disasters that have been forecast but have not yet happened, she recalls the anxiety and frustrated desire to know the truth that accompanied her passion. The parallel is deliberately bounded: in both situations, she experiences uncertainty, but wartime reality offers no room for fantasy or imagination. The Second World War comparison thus belongs to a reflection on the distance between imagined possibilities and actual violence, not to a claim that the narrator’s private passion and war are equivalent.