Published on Friday, January 28, 2005 by the NationalCatholic Reporter
What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day
by Joan Chittister
Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to
notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the
American president saying, "The survival of liberty in
our land increasingly depends on the success of
liberty in other lands."
But that was not their lead story.
The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a
large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her
little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up,
cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her
white clothes and spread hands and small tight face
were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her
father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal
Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her
parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in
the back seat.
A series of pictures of the incident played on the
inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded
in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the
car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a
soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large
automatic weapon on the four children, all potential
enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as
they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat
and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her
parent's blood.
No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this
picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on
these faces here.
I found myself closing my eyes over and over again as
I stared at the story, maybe to crush the tears
forming there, maybe in the hope that the whole scene
would simply disappear.
But no, like the photo of a naked little girl bathed
in napalm and running down a road in Vietnam served to
crystallize the situation there for the rest of the
world, I knew that this picture of a screaming, angry,
helpless, orphaned child could do the same.
The soldiers standing in the dusk had called "halt,"
the story said, but no one did. Maybe the soldiers'
accents were bad. Maybe the car motor was unduly
noisy. Maybe the children were laughing loudly -- the
way children do on family trips. Whatever the case,
the car did not stop, the soldiers shot with deadly
accuracy, seven lives changed in an instant: two died
in body, five died in soul.
BBC news announced that the picture was spreading
across Europe like a brushfire that morning, featured
from one major newspaper to another, served with
coffee and Danish from kitchen table to kitchen table
in one country after another. I watched, while
Inauguration Day dawned across the Atlantic, as the
Irish up and down the aisle on the train from
Killarney to Dublin, narrowed their eyes at the
picture, shook their heads silently and slowly over
it, and then sat back heavily in their seats, too
stunned into reality to go back to business as usual
-- the real estate section, the sports section, the
life-style section of the paper.
Here was the other side of the inauguration story. No
military bands played for this one. No bulletproof
viewing stands could stop the impact of this insight
into the glory of force. Here was an America they
could no longer understand. The contrast rang cruelly
everywhere.
I sat back and looked out the train window myself.
Would anybody in the United States be seeing this
picture today? Would the United States ever see it, in
fact? And if it is printed in the United States, will
it also cross the country like wildfire and would
people hear the unwritten story under it?
There are 54 million people in Iraq. Over half of them
are under the age of 15. Of the over 100,000 civilians
dead in this war, then, over half of them are
children. We are killing children. The children are
our enemy. And we are defeating them.
"I'll tell you why I voted for George Bush," a friend
of mine said. "I voted for George Bush because he had
the courage to do what Al Gore and John Kerry would
never have done."
I've been thinking about that one.
Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still
alive. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad,
Mosul and Fallujah are burning. But my government has
the courage to kill children or their parents. And I'm
supposed to be impressed.
That's an unfair assessment, of course. A lot of young
soldiers have died, too. A lot of weekend soldiers are
maimed for life. A lot of our kids went into the
military only to get a college education and are now
shattered in soul by what they had to do to other
bodies.
A lot of adult civilians have been blasted out of
their homes and their neighborhoods and their cars.
More and more every day. According to U.N. Development
Fund for Women, 15 percent of wartime casualties in
World War I were civilians. In World War II, 65
percent were civilians. By the mid '90s, over 75
percent of wartime casualties were civilians.
In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14
other deaths, 93 percent of them are civilian. But
those things happen in war, the story says. It's all
for a greater good, we have to remember. It's all to
free them. It's all being done to spread "liberty."
From where I stand, the only question now is who or
what will free us from the 21st century's new
definition of bravery. Who will free us from the
notion that killing children or their civilian parents
takes courage?
A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Sister Joan is a
best-selling author and well-known international
lecturer. She is founder and executive director of
Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for
Contemporary Spirituality, and past president of the
Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses and the
Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Sister Joan
has been recognized by universities and national
organizations for her work for justice, peace and
equality for women in the Church and society. She is
an active member of the International Peace Council.
© 2005 The National Catholic Reporter
