Children

There's a new article by Howard Zinn today at Commondreams, reprinted from Newsday. Howard Zinn won't be celebrating the end of this war. He will presumably be satisfied that the killing has stopped, but as this war was not entered into for moral reasons, it cannot end happily. He calls for a new kind of patriotism, that would enable us to avoid the horrors of war.

"Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways."

While I understand Zinn's consternation with how we arrived at this point, one wonders why he fails to take into account those children who have and who would have grown up under Saddam's brutal regime. While I in now way want to minimize the potential problems facing the US, I don't think it's quite that easy to ignore pictures of cheering Iraqis.