Iraq: Suffer the Children

I have seen a lot of carnage in my long career in journalism and I learned a long time ago to compartmentalize it. But there are times when the sights, sounds and smells of death are too big for the little box I put death in and it comes vomiting out. When that happens, it usually is because children are the victims.

I was deeply affected by the murders of those five Amish girls last week. Part of that was paternal. It wasn't too many years ago when my children were their ages and going off to a rural school each morning. Part of that was my familiarity with and love of the area where the Nickel Mines Slaughter took place, which is not far from Kiko's House, and my admiration for the humble people who populate it.

This morning I went to a website that I use to download pictures from Iraq and was confronted by this image of a man craddling the body of his son. I lost my shit.

I wept for this child and his father and his family and all the Iraqi children and all of the fathers and families who have been victimized by George Bush's war.

Then I became angry at our power hungry, obfuscating, tone deaf, morally intransigent president who when confronted with the horrors that his hubris has unpleashed mouths platitudes about "making progress" and refusing to "cut and run."

It is impossible to ascertain how many children have been killed in the three and a half year old war.

The numbers that I found range from the absurdly low to absurdly high and usually are driven by one political agenda or another. But they certainly run into the thousands.

I do not know the name of the child swaddled in a blanket in this photograph taken in Baquba. But I do know one thing: Regardless of who pulled the trigger or detonated the device, George Bush killed him.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD, LITTLE HASAN

Can you imagine trying to bring a child into the world in Baghdad in October 2006?

Trying to bring a child into the world when you miscarried the twins because of the nearby detonation of a bomb? When the newborn's father was kidnapped and has never been seen again?

Read Miraj's story at Baghdad Chronicles and weep.

(Photograph by Ali Yussef/Agence France-Presse)