Ali...

I know there's been much talk of this 12-year-old Iraqi boy, online and elsewhere. But Jon Lee Anderson's account of a visit to a Baghdad hospital, part of a longer article in The New Yorker, is worth the read. Though not for the faint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach!

Seriously. Don't read this post unless you're prepared for a graphic description of the personal horror our tax-dollars have brought about.

One of Dr. Saleh’s assistants, a young woman, had pulled some images up on a computer screen in his office. Dr. Saleh invited me to look at them with him. The first image the assistant showed us was of a boy lying naked in the emergency operating theatre. A catheter and tube was attached to his penis. The child’s legs were smooth, but his entire torso was black, and his arms were horribly burned. At about the biceps, the flesh of both arms became charred, black grotesqueries. One of his hands was a twisted, melted claw. His other arm had apparently been burned off at the elbow, and two long bones were sticking out of it. It looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit.

The child’s face was covered by an anesthesia mask. “This is Ali,” Dr. Saleh said. “He is twelve. He was wounded in a rocket attack the night before last in the southeastern part of Baghdad, about fifteen minutes from here. Ali lost his mother, his father, and his six brothers and sisters. Four homes were destroyed; in one of them, the whole family was killed, eight people.”

It was hard to imagine that the person in the photograph could be alive, but Dr. Saleh said that Ali was still conscious. “I don’t think he will survive, though,” he said in a flat tone. “These burned people have complications after three or four days; in the first week they usually get septicemia.” His assistant was pulling up new images on her monitor. They showed Ali again, on the same bed and in the same position as before, but this time without his charred appendages. Both arms had been amputated, and the stumps were wrapped in white bandages. His torso was covered in some kind of clear grease. The mask had been removed from his face, and he appeared to be sleeping. He had a beautiful head, with the feminine features of a prepubescent boy...

[...]

Dr. Saleh asked Ali how he felt. “O.K.,” he said. Wasn’t he in a lot of pain, I said to Dr. Saleh, in a whisper. I spoke in English. “No,” he replied. “Deeply burned patients don’t feel much pain because of the damage to their nerves.” I stared at Ali, who looked back at me and at Dr. Saleh. His aunt got up and stood behind the head of the bed. She said nothing.

I asked Dr. Saleh to ask Ali what he was thinking about. Ali spoke for a moment in Arabic, in a boy’s soft, high-pitched voice. “He doesn’t think of anything, and he doesn’t remember anything,” Dr. Saleh said. He explained that Ali did not know that his family was dead. I asked Ali about school. He was in the sixth grade, he said, and his favorite subject was geography. As he spoke, his aunt stroked his hair. Did he like sports? Yes, he replied, especially volleyball, and also soccer. Was there anything he wanted, or needed? No, nothing. He looked at me and said something that Saleh didn’t translate until I insisted: “He says that Bush is a criminal and he is fighting for oil.” Ali had said this as he had said everything else, without expression. Ali’s aunt began to sob quietly behind him. I asked Ali what he wanted to be when he grew up. “An officer,” he said, and his aunt cried out, “Inshallah”—“If God wills it.”

Dr. Saleh had begun to weep, and I could hear him catching his breath. He tried to compose himself, and we said goodbye to Ali. Neither of us spoke as we walked down the hall to the sterile room, where the orderlies took off our smocks and masks. Dr. Saleh rubbed his eyes and cleared his throat several times. We went back to his office, and he washed his face in a sink. “So it’s untrue what they say about doctors being able to suspend their emotions,” I said.

He looked at me. His eyes were pink. “We are human beings,” he replied...

Anderson's article, which deals with much beyond Ali, is one of the best reports I've read so far on the invasion of Iraq. A gifted writer, Anderson chooses small details that together paint a potent picture of what it's like to actually be there.

As for Ali's current condition, a report in yesterday's British Independent said the 12-year-old had been evacuated from the Al-Kindi Hospital, which like every other large Baghdad hospital has been ransacked by looters, to Saddam General, the worst-equipped hospital in the capitol, located in its most violent slum, Saddam City. Which doesn't bode well for Ali's long-term survival.

Saddam General's director expressed frustration at foreign reporters' preoccupation with the boy.

"Why do you all want to talk to Ali? There are hundreds of children suffering like him, and we are getting more every day," said Moufak Gabriel...

Indeed.

Yes, this is quite a victory Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz! I have trouble sleeping at night, contemplating its horrors. But from what I've read, not one of you are losing any sleep over it.

If there is a Hell, surely, it will be peopled by the likes of our current national leadership.