As I was standing in line at the market the other day, I looked up and noticed between the tabloid magazines, bubble gum and chocolate bars, the cover of Time Magazine: a young boy in a combat helmet who looked no older than fourteen.

When I was a child, I remember a scene in “Dr. Zhivago” of young boys in uniform who were randomly shot down in a field of wheat. After they were killed, the commander looked down at the children’s faces and angrily exclaimed, “My God, they’re boys, they sent children to fight their war!”

During the recent televised interviews, George W. Bush referred to our soldiers as “kids.” He was smiling, completely unaffected by the unconscionable fact of his assertion. No one says a word, including Hillary Clinton, who was proud to announce that she called a young boy’s mother in New York from an Afghanistan military medical camp to let her know that her son is getting good medical assistance.

It didn’t occur to the Senator who, ironically, made children her central concern in It Takes A Village, or to George Bush, that they have sent children into an Indescribable Hell that no girl or boy should have to witness much less participate in.

Teenagers are children, emotionally, intellectually and physically. Predictably, our media reporters never comment on this – even as they interview the boys and girls shipped off to Iraq like cargo. But we can see their child-like faces.

When a boy is lying in a pool of blood and suffering from unspeakable pain, he will call out to his mother in a delirious state, not from cowardice but from a common, instinctual human experience.

Bush’s “surge” is a military euphemism for sacrificing twenty thousand CHILDREN into his Iraq’s purgatory. And should his “soldier-kids” survive Iraq’s purgatory, many will return without legs, arms or faces severely deformed beyond recognition.

Think of it this way, ten years ago, an eighteen-year-old teenager was only eight years old. George W. Bush was fifty-one years old.

How easy it is for Bush, indeed, for us all to render these teenagers into statistics, into an abstract policy plan. These children entered the National Guard because they came from poor families who could not afford to financially support them. They wanted an opportunity to attend college. Instead, Bush and his policy-makers have used them as cannon fodder for an unjustifiable invasion that has more to do with oil than anything else. These soldier-kids are disposable. They are expendable. They are merely an extension of the weapon contractors’ profits.

The next time you hear George W. Bush refer to these young girls and boys as “kids,” consider how he accepts that they are children with a smirk. Even his own daughters are older than the girls and boys in Iraq, a purgatory that he, himself, wouldn’t step foot in out of cowardice.

It’s time to reverse the accusation on Tony Snow by telling him that there is nothing American about sending children into Bush’s Iraq-purgatory that has made defense contractors billionaires.

Q.: If the American Oil Corporations were forced to pay for this war instead of the American tax-payers, Eight Billion Dollars a Month, would we be in this mess right now?

Instead of negotiating an oil deal and keeping Iraq intact, American oil tycoons decided that WE should pay the consequences with our children’s blood and financial debt so that they can steal Iraq’s oil for free.

Moreover, eight billion dollars a month for five years would have paved the way for establishing new energy sources, schools, hospitals, and much more for the American people. But this law-less administration could care less about America, its people, its children, its traditions, its environment and its constitution. Indeed, New Orleans represents a blatant metaphor for the Bush administration’s eight years of hell.

Jacqueline Marcus’ (jackiemarcus@justice.com) editorials and letters have appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Slate, New Times, (San Luis Obispo, CA Cover story: “The Politics of Restraint”). Her poems have appeared in national university journals, The Kenyon Review, The Ohio Review, The Antioch Review and many more periodicals. Her book of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan State University Press. She teaches philosophy at Cuesta College and is the editor of ForPoetry.com

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