THE FURY AND THE JURY.

The first Gulf War came to us via satellite and without words. The road to Basra--the totem of that military cakewalk--was a silent spectacle of incineration. Now, in the second Gulf adventure, Americans can hear the war, but the wall of silence around the female experience of carnage remains more or less intact. War and tyranny dehumanize the enemy; silence is part of that process. To inflict pain, physical or psychic, turns us away from the world; we stop thinking and feeling. In "9 Parts of Desire" (at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre), Heather Raffo's remarkable one-woman show, which bears witness to Iraqi women's political oppression, an expatriate named Hooda explains ...