In Broken Baghdad, Photo Negatives
Photo: Wounded 12-year-old Iraqi Ali Ismaeel Abbas, who lost his arms in a U.S. air strike, lies in a hospital bed awaiting word on a medical evacuation, in the Baghdad suburb of Saddam City, April 15, 2003. Doctors at a Kuwaiti hospital said they were preparing to treat the child, who touched hearts around the world after he lost his arms and his parents, brother and two sisters three weeks ago in a bombing raid on Baghdad.
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page C01
The memory of these pictures may mark a fault line between the United States, where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has chastised journalists who focus on looting for being “Henny-Pennys,” and the world, where opposition to the war has, quite naturally, led to more concern with the pity of war.
Wars can be made cleaner, but never clean; destruction minimized but never eliminated.
Now that the destruction is done, the boy maimed, the museum ravaged, these images do approach a kind of equivalence, in their appeal to our conscience and in the extent to which they inspire grief.
Remember the real innocents suffering from this war. That’s more important than anything else, because they have lost everything, and we have only lost a bit more of our compassion as we shrug these murders off.
2 comments on “The Real Losers”
I remember reading another article on him when he was saying he would kill himself if he didn’t get arms.
People who are pro-war must not have seen what really goes on…or understand at least.
Yeah, it really is a terrible shame. I wish the media would actually show things like this more so that we’d all know the real horrors.