BAGHDAD -- Ali Ismaeel Abbas lies back in his bed, powerless to cover his tiny, charred body from the prying eyes of strangers. There are just bandaged stumps where his arms used to be.
From his upper chest to below his waist, the 12-year-old's skin is a myriad of colours, bright red to coal black, shades that speak of a pain that must be excruciating. But the burns, which doctors say cover 50 per cent of his body, are far from the first thing Ali is worried about.

Ali is scared that without his arms, he will never be able to play with his friends again. And he's not sure how he'll live without his mother, father and younger brother, all of whom were killed when their house was struck last week by an errant American bomb. His six sisters were also injured in the blast.

"Can you give me hands?" Ali asks a pair of foreign reporters who visited his bedside this week. He has become this war's poster child for Britain's crusading tabloid press, so he will probably get the prosthetic arms he so desperately wants. In fact, a newspaper fight has broken out on Fleet Street over which paper will raise the money to "save" Ali.
When he hears this, Ali becomes excited about the prospect of again being able to do some of the simple things in life. "Can I eat with them? Can I play with them?" he asks. Told yes, he breaks into a wide smile. When someone tells him that he'll also be able to hit his friends with them, he laughs for the first time all day.

Ali's aunt watches protectively over him from the side of the bed throughout the stream of media visits, but she won't give her name. Her nephew may get new arms, but she says it won't be so easy to undo the rest of what was done by the American attack on the family's home in Baghdad's Zafaranih district.

"They burned the house, the whole house," she says, starting to cry. "He lost his mother and his father. His mother was six months pregnant. Of course we're angry."

At the mention of his parents, Ali loses his brave disposition and also begins to sob. There's a lot of hate for America in the room.

It seems that every conflict since the dawn of the television age has had its Ali -- an innocent face that asks a question about the combatants.
Nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running away from her burning village in Vietnam made the world question not only America's use of napalm, but its very presence in Southeast Asia.

Hector Peterson's limp 13-year-old body, being carried away from the first Soweto riots, asked how long the world could tolerate South Africa's white-supremacist regime.

The televised shooting of a 12-year-old boy named Muhammad Al-Dura by Israeli troops made people wonder whether the next generations of Israelis and Palestinians were already doomed to continue the cycle of violence that their ancestors began.
Ali's face -- the only part of him left unscarred -- is a counterbalance to the ecstatic images of Saddam Hussein's statue being hauled down in the city centre. His pleading eyes ask whether the invaders can overcome the anger they generated here through three weeks of ceaseless bombing, and whether Iraqi civilians and the American army can ever learn to trust each other.

Already there are signs of how big the gap in understanding really is. As crowds lingered around the fallen Hussein statue Wednesday evening, one American soldier told reporters that he looked at capturing Baghdad as getting revenge for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in the United States -- even though the Iraqi regime was never linked to the attack.

Another soldier who waded into the crowd to shake hands seemed absolutely astounded that many of them were upset about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

American troops have infuriated many in Baghdad by stopping families, for security reasons, from travelling to the nearby holy cities of Najaf and Karbala to bury their dead.

Poignantly, one American soldier tried to celebrate the toppling of Saddam's statue by draping a U.S. flag over its head. Several Iraqis rejoiced by chanting "Allahu Akbar!" or "God is great!" Neither gesture was particularly well-understood by the other side.

In many ways, the United States came to Baghdad the same way every new regime has come here for centuries -- weapons drawn, the enemy vanquished, but little in common with the people who live here. Historically, that has never bred a lot of love between the Iraqis and those who claimed to govern them.

At the end of the First World War, Baghdad was occupied by British forces, which used some of the same rhetoric then as Americans are using now to win over the hearts and minds of average Iraqis. When General Stanley Maude entered the city in March of 1917, he read out a proclamation telling Iraqis that the British army was there to liberate them from "strange tyrants" and invited them "to participate in the management of your own civil affairs, in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British army."

Three years later, the Great Iraqi Revolution began, an uprising that left 10,000 people dead and was quelled only when the British brought in reinforcements from India. A year later, an Iraqi king was enthroned and the British had begun to pull out, sparking a series of military coups that led to the rise of Saddam Hussein's Baath party.
Labib Kamhawi, an independent political analyst in Jordan, speculated last week, as U.S. troops were approaching Baghdad, that Iraqis would be happier in the long run under a dictator that was one of their own than some American-imposed form of democracy. "To have a despotic regime is one thing. To have your country invaded by a foreign power is quite another," he said.

Most Iraqis are only too aware that the United States supported Mr. Hussein throughout some of the bloodiest years of his rule, back when it suited their interests because Iraq was waging war against the ayatollahs in Iran.

Mr. Kamhawi predicted that if the United States tried to stay in Iraq too long, the situation could deteriorate into a rerun of Israel's bloody 18-year occupation of Lebanon.

The U.S. administration says it doesn't want to stay in Iraq anywhere near that long. It says that once Iraq is running smoothly and peacefully -- and the oil fields are pumping again -- American troops will pull out and leave the governing of Iraq to the Iraqis.

Many here will await that day as anxiously as they did the fall of Saddam Hussein.
"We are happy Saddam is gone, so we are happy with the Americans for doing this," said a 28-year-old unemployed man who, like many Iraqis, still felt uncomfortable giving out his name even with the Baath party ostensibly out of power.

But as we watched a column of Abrams tanks roll through his hometown, the ancient City of Peace, he said he prayed the Americans would not overstay their welcome. "As soon as we have peace and security, they should leave."

The Globe and Mail; 12 April 2003