As war presses forward, must women merely watch?

Karib Kubaisi is 2 years old, but her brown eyes look much older. Her face was scraped and bruised when a missile hit her village in southern Lebanon. We ran Karib’s photo on our front page Monday, in a story about the battle escalating now between Israel and Hezbollah.

Karib looks a little like my 1-year-old great-niece, Mia. We call her Mia Macaroni, and though she says only a few words, we feel that Mia understands everything we say. She follows us with her wise eyes, eyes that remind me of Karib’s.

Monday afternoon, I came home early from work, downed by summer bronchitis. I turned on cable TV and watched the latest Middle East “war” unfold. I watched it into the night and wondered: “Where are the women?”

I woke up with the realization that we women are letting down the Karibs and Mias of our future. We are letting the guys “do” war again. We are standing by as they kill each other and take the innocents down with them.

On Fox News, I watched an exchange between President George W. Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. The men thought the microphone was off. It wasn’t. The two men sounded stumped by this new Middle East mess. They have aged so much since their Sept. 11 salad days. They look old enough to be their own fathers.

But this is not about the men. It’s about the women. And where are they?

They are reporting the news. One Fox reporter looked about 25; she wore a helmet and blue combat vest, and her makeup was flawless. Over on MSNBC and CNN, the women anchors were not much older, and their makeup was flawless, too.

On mute, the women looked like cheerleaders on the sidelines of a tense football game. They weren’t smiling.

Their side was definitely not winning.

Where are the women?

In Lebanon, they are weeping on steps. Their homes have been bombed. Their children killed. They wail their grief-in-the-raw wail.

But mostly on cable TV news, we see the men. Angry men. Shouting, blaming, spitting men.

Hezbollah men march in formation wearing black scarf-masks that remind me of inverted Ku Klux Klan hoods.

Where are the women?

As I write these words Tuesday morning, cable TV is on again, and air-raid sirens sound in Haifa, Israel. Smoke fills the air.

The sirens have a surreal tone. In the science-fiction film “The Time Machine,” sirens blare and blare when the 1960s world atom-bombs itself into oblivion. That’s the exact sound.

I think of the women in Haifa and the women in southern Lebanon, and I picture them scurrying their crying children into shelters. They tell these children that everything will be OK, a universal lie that women tell in times of war.

Where are the women?

In the Greek classic “Lysistrata,” wives on both sides of the war, sick of the bloodshed, plan a sex strike, refusing to sleep with their warring husbands until the madness stops.

It stops. We women need a modern-day plan of our own.

Watching the Israel- Hezbollah conflict unfold, I feel an unusual foreboding, as if everything in the world is about to tilt – and not in a good way.

Maybe the feeling stems, in part, from battling a cold in the hottest days of summer.

Maybe it will pass.

But I worry that this is how women throughout the world felt on the verge of World War I and World War II.

They sensed their worlds would alter inexorably, some of their children would die, and they felt powerless to stop it.

Since the last world war, women have made incredible advances, especially in the United States and Europe. Condoleezza Rice is our secretary of state, after all. But the relentless violence in the Middle East makes it clear that we are still not the deciders. We are the women. And this is where we are.