Friday, October 01, 2004

It's enough already


"Baghdad, Iraq -- The jeans were falling off the little boy who lay slumped in the arms of his father. Blood seeped from his lolling head. His eyes were closed.


Running through the front door of Yarmouk hospital, the man rushed his son to the emergency room, past the growing pool of black-red blood on the floor underneath the gurney of another patient. He placed the boy, who looked about 7 years old, on a bed, and a doctor in a white coat quickly examined him.


The boy was dead, the doctor told the man.


"They killed my son," shouted the man, as the emergency room went silent for a second. "You killed my son. I killed my son, with my hands. I will die. My son, my son, my son, my son."


The man slapped his head with his hands. He crouched down on his knees and held his boy, tears streaming down his cheeks. A policeman stood behind him, his face crumpling into tears. The doctor pulled a piece of white muslin over the boy. The father picked him up and about three minutes since he had arrived at the hospital, he carried his son in his arms out of the front door again.


Thirty-five children were among the 42 who died yesterday in suicide bombings in Baghdad."


via.


Enough soldiers have died.


Enough aid and care workers have died.


More than enough regular people, trying to carve out a life in a war torn country, have died.


Way more than enough children have died.


Enough.


It's time to call the soldiers home.


It's time to take the 1.47 billion spent each week on the war, and ask another country to go in and help the Iraqi people build good Hospitals and homes and schools and roads and businesses and give what's left to the  people so they can rebuild and get back on their feet. 


Pushing the fight won't make it better anymore. It will just make it bitter.


It's Enough.


And somebody very high up should take responsibility for the mistakes that have been made, and the information that's been wrong.


 


I don't comment on this very often, but this is Enough. It just is.


 



"Three ceiling-high refrigerators constitute the hospital's morgue. They sit at the rear of the compound, with a back door that allows relatives who have identified bodies to carry them quickly away for burial.


All three refrigerators were full yesterday.


A man in a pink shirt and black pants leaned against a metal pole and sobbed. Another banged his head against a wall. Women wailed, clasped each other, rocking back and forth in a rhythm of grief and comfort. There were too many people crying to count.


Inside the refrigerators were piles of bodies, most of them of children. Severed limbs lay next to some.


A group of men found their young relative in one of the walk-in refrigerators, then prepared a rough wooden coffin outside it by lining the box with a pink floral sheet. On a stretcher they carried out a boy of about 12. He was skinny, his hip bones jutting out as if he had been undergoing a pubescent growth spurt. His body looked already stiff with death when the men lifted him off the stretcher and into the coffin.


"This is freedom?" asked al-Janabi, the man who had lost a nephew. He pointed at the dead boy."


 



4 comments:

  1. The more of the remains of war I saw in Congo made me hate war more and more. This reminds me of what I saw and heard. It seems so pointless to me. Peoples pride seems to get in the way a lot.

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  2. A sickening, heart-wrenching story. However I notice that the boy was killed by a suicide bomber (terrorist). Terrorism works. I'd love to see the U.S., British and other Coalition forces withdraw from Iraq, but only when there is a sound plan in place to ensure protection of the police, courts, and government that have replaced Saddam's regime. Unfortunately I don't trust the U.N. to be much help, based on their track record.

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  3. Too much emotion to say anything.

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  4. Its sad, it really is. The problem is that the terrorists are killing the people they are "supposedly" standing up for, or resisting for. The US must stay, they must follow through with securing peace in the region, or all of these deaths, civilian, and coalition will be for naught. Saddam had to go, but what replaces him when the US leaves will be the same if they pull out now.

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