If your Mother and Father were shot dead in front of your very eyes by an occupying military force do you think this might have an influence on how you viewed the country whose men it was that killed your parents? That is the question on my mind as I sit here looking at the faces of five children who went through the harrowing experience of seeing their parents shot and killed by U.S. soldiers after they failed to stop at a dawn check point.

I’ll accept that the American soldiers were simply doing their job (for what that’s worth), but nonetheless five kids watched the life leave their Mom and Dad. The people who bought them into the world and bought them up, who had earlier put them in the car, were gone in an instant, a terrifying instant under a hail of bullets and noise.

I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that those five children are somewhat more likely to become terrorists than before. They may not of course. One can only hope that they’ll be able to move on with their lives and forgive America and the soldiers. But what if shooting those two people dead has created 5 new terrorists. Terrorists willing to avenge what they will probably view as the needless slaughtering of their parents. Though hatred is an ugly and destructive force, could we not perhaps at least see how such a force might find its way into the hearts and minds of these five children.

They are of course not the only five children to have witnessed such a horrific scene, however this time the rest of the world gets to share in the minute part of the tragedy because a photographer was there to capture the event in harrowing detail.

The BBC show a gallery of ten pictures that feature pictures of the five confused and clearly traumatised orphans. Pictures that would provoke international sympathy and mobilisation of resources from around the world if they were the faces of children caught in the recent tsunami. But there will be no international aid effort for these kids, they weren’t caught in the tsunami, they were just caught in the crossfire, and it would seem that for that we don’t care as much.

I find myself shaking my head as I look at these pictures. With the war in Iraq officially over nearly a year ago according to Bush, the country is in ruins ahead of elections that it would seem most Iraqi’s won’t take part in even if they knew they could. And as another devastating car bomb explodes today in Iraq I am left wondering once more, why on earth we ever got into this mess. How is it we went to war in the middle east yet we don’t spend nearly as much money in a far more legitimate war on drug production in countries across the globe. How come we don’t send troops into countries with shameful human rights records, how is it we don’t send troops in to places torn by civil wars.

It’s plain to anyone who reads my blog that I find it hard to have even the slightest scrap of respect for the current President of the United States. But that aside, I look at the faces of these children in Iraq and feel as sorry for them as I do for the children in Southeast Asia for whom there would seem to be so much help at hand.

Now of course the situation in Iraq has become a mess of monolithic proportions costing not only billions of American tax payers dollars, but also the lives of their soldiers and the many many thousands of people who have been caught up in this war for no good reason. The Bush administration has now quietly abandoned the search for those weapons of mass destruction that were so serious a threat that they had to level much of Iraqs populated areas to find them. And while the people in Faluja slowly return to the rubble of their houses to rebuild their shattered lives without so much of a cent of aid money, fireworks will light up the sky over the Whitehouse to celebrate another four years of the Commander-in-Chief of the army that destroyed their livelihood.

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5 Children orphaned by U.S. soilders
Iraq under occupation
Poll: World more dangerous with Bush
America divided
United for Peace