Salon: "The heartbreak of war." For one reader, a single photograph

[milkyway]

brought home the inconceivable horror that is Iraq.

By J. Scott Smith

Perhaps, being a new father, I am overly sensitive to such things, but today the image I saw on my computer screen brought me to tears. The photograph, appearing on the BBC's Web site, was from some street or another in Fallujah, Iraq. The caption, although gruesome enough, was a comparatively bland statement that "Bodies have been left uncollected for days." Yet what the picture depicted was testimony to the unmitigated and unavoidable tragedy of war. In the picture we see the "uncollected" body of a man lying in the street, his arms still clutching yet another uncollected body, that of a child. The child's body was clasping the man's shoulders, holding on for what was dear life to the now headless corpse of, who knows, his (or her, you cannot tell) father, uncle, brother, someone he trusted to protect and shelter him. The picture can be seen here. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4012677.stm

One can only imagine the sheer terror and unfathomable sadness of their last moments, gunfire and explosions ringing in their ears, trying to find safety in a war they did not ask for, a war they did not start. Perhaps the man was trying to carry the child to safety, or maybe the child saw him die and rushed to him only to be killed as well. All we know is that there they now lie, a man and his child, eternally locked in each other's arms, as soldiers from a foreign land amble past.
<snip>

No, it is our dear leaders who must be held to account. They chose to fight a war of conquest -- a much more violent proposition than other types of war -- without good reason. They sold the war on false evidence and false assumptions about the effect on the civilian population. We will bring the shining light of democracy to the Iraqi people, they said. Americans were led to believe that only those who chose to fight would suffer. Never, ever should anyone try to sell a war by sugarcoating its realities, by implying that it will be an antiseptic video game of surgically precise weapons, that there will only be the most "minimal" loss of innocent life. That is the stuff of Tom Clancy novels, not real war. I find it inconceivable that a man who professes to be "pro-life" could so blithely commit so many others to die. Tonight, George Bush will go to sleep happy, comfortable in his electoral victory and looking forward to spending that political capital he says he "earned." Meanwhile a man and his innocent child lie rotting on a dusty Fallujah street.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/letters/2004/11/18/fallujah/index.html

[NewYorkerfromMass]

1. another view of that scene

[elehhhhna]

2. i saw my daughter in that photo...

[ElementaryPenguin]

3. I saw mine, too!

I'm so far beyond disgusted, I'm fast approaching complete speechlessness!!

:puke: