Four More Years Of...

Four More Years

The Terror of War

This little Iraqi girl was sitting in a car one moment, perhaps sleeping, as her parents drove at night through the streets of Tal Afar. Perhaps she was jolted awake by the warning shots; perhaps the sound of gun fire is common in Iraq, and is a signal that the driver should drive faster. Insurgents? Americans? Bandits? Who knows. But stopping to find out too often results in death. Her father chose to drive on, perhaps unaware that an American roadblock lay ahead.

We don't know what she was thinking in the next instant as dozens of small explosions shook the bodies of her parents, sending bits of their flesh and bone flying though the car, ending their lives and drenching everything and everyone in their blood. We know that her terror was caused not by some ideological extremist, but by American soldiers, acting as the avenging hand of George W. Bush.

We can leave it to this little girl to tell us, in twenty years or so, whether America's "War on Terror" was worth the lives of her parents. We can leave it to her sons and daughters, in thirty or forty years, to tell us whether they will seek vengeance for the death of their grandparents. And we can only wonder if the Bush administration's sixth or seventh rationale for going to war against Iraq will prove to be the one this little girl can live with. We can only wonder.