All very well and good, but there's also:

Pictures of young Ali Ismaeel Abbas' tortured body have appeared in newspapers and on television screens across Europe.

His voice has been heard pleading for life to return to normal after his family was killed and his arms torn off and body burnt when a missile landed on his Baghdad home.

The 12-year-old was asleep at the time of the attack in Diala Bridge district east of Baghdad. His mother, five months pregnant, died, as did his father, brother and seven other members of his family.

[link|http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/08/sprj.irq.ali/index.html|http://www.cnn.com/2...rq.ali/index.html]

I'm not suggesting that no good can come of this mugging, or that any such good is automatically negated by "collateral damage," and I've snagged the armless kid and pressed him into service for rhetorical purposes not because my heartstrings are yanked unto breaking but rather because he was, uh, handy, BUT:

Let's don't allow the heartwarming stories of our Kindly, Heroic Troops Throwing Candy Bars to Plucky Little Cheering Urchins in Distant Lands We've Gone Selflessly to Rescue (growing up in the cultural backwash of WWII I was raised on this pap, and swallowed it unquestioningly) serve as an excuse to avert our eyes from the very real death and misery we've inflicted, the lives we've ended and the lives, like this one cited, that we've blighted forever in the practice of our favored style of warmaking, of the permanent irremediable harm visited on people whose only crime was to live under the rule of a former client with whom we've had a falling out. Let's enjoy as much American Triumphalism as we feel we're entitled to, but I insist we clean our plates, consuming the side of atrocity as well.

cordially,