The Others

In 2002 Howard Zinn wrote a great piece about the deaths of civilians from the countries on the other end of our guns, and how they were so often ignored by the media, and Americans as a whole.

I do believe that if people could see the consequences of the bombing campaign as vividly as we were all confronted with the horrifying photos in the wake of September 11, if they saw on television night after night the blinded and maimed children, the weeping parents of Afghanistan, they might ask: Is this the way to combat terrorism?

Surely it is time, half a century after Hiroshima, to embrace a universal morality, to think of all children, everywhere, as our own.

In this spirit I link to an article in today's Washington Post which pays humble tribute to a fallen civilian -- one of the "others" -- who has been killed in Iraq.

Unlike the U.S. soldiers who die in this conflict, the names of most Iraqi victims will never be published, consigned to the anonymity that death in the Iraqi capital brings these days