These Are Not My Children

via Think Progress.

Life under Saddam Hussein was not easy. Living under sanctions wasn't easy. The Iraqi people have been suffering for a long time.

How can you look at the picture above and not feel your heart break a little?

Along with freedom and democracy and purple fingers, we've given the next generation of Iraqis plenty of reason to hate us.....

About 70% of primary school students in a Baghdad neighborhood suffer symptoms of trauma-related stress such as bed-wetting or stuttering, according to a survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health.

The survey of about 2,500 youngsters is the most comprehensive look at how the war is affecting Iraqi children, said Iraq's national mental health adviser and author of the study, Mohammed Al-Aboudi.

"The fighting is happening in the streets in front of our houses and schools," Al-Aboudi said. "This is very difficult for the children to adapt to."

The study is to be released next month. Al-Aboudi discussed the findings with USA TODAY.

Many Iraqi children have to pass dead bodies on the street as they walk to school in the morning, according to a separate report last week by the International Red Cross. Others have seen relatives killed or have been injured in mortar or bomb attacks.

Read the rest.

I try to stay away from the but what about the children manner of reasoning, but this is too much. We've done this.

Our President stands at the podium and says that this is necessary so that American children don't have to see dead bodies and suffer shellings and mortar explosions and know what it's like to have your loved ones killed in war. Well, most American children don't have to experience that. The children of our troops live under the threat of losing a parent ever day that this pigheaded Administration is in power.

I know parents who won't let their precious darlings take the school bus because they don't want them to be exposed to older kids without parental supervision. These parents can't begin to imagine what it would be like to let their children walk to school, much less walk to school in a war zone.

President Bush keeps reminding us that we're in a time of war. But he wants it both ways. He wants us to be afraid and to back him as our war president. But he doesn't want the majority of us to experience the horrors of war. We're to shop and spend and fill our gas tanks with ever pricier gasoline. We're to look away when the liberal media shows us ugly pictures of bloody bodies and human bits scattered over bombing sites. We're to plaster our autos with flags and support the troops magnets and sing God Bless America at baseball games. We're supposed to wear a flag lapel pin instead of a black mourning armband.

American children are no more special than any other child. The scars that we're leaving on the Iraqi children go much deeper and will last much longer than most of us can imagine.

It's time American parents who love their children and want them to have a wonderful future understand that the seeds of hate will grow a world that's a much more dangerous than the one we live in today. By creating a mess of Iraq, George W. Bush has laid the groundwork for the thing that he says he's trying to fight. The terror on 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq, but Bush and his neocon cronies have merged the two and made them one. And our children - all or children's future is much less secure as a result.

Cross-posted at the Politits.