Penny Loaves

the little soldiers

NPR's Ann Garrels (Naked in Baghdad) had a story on today's Morning Edition about the popularity of toy machine guns among children in Iraq (scroll down until you see it). Toy stores in Baghdad are doing brisk business with plastic AK-47s and submachine guns--the more realistic, the more popular. In the piece, an American soldier marvelled at the detail of the detachable magazines, the butts, and the trigger mechanisms.

The danger is obvious given how jittery GIs are in a battlefield environment where the enemy is indistinguishable from the civilian, and so American troops more and more find themselves confiscating caches of real and toy weapons. Yet parents don't seem to care that their children play with toys that could get them killed, and in fact buy the toys for them.

Some have mused that insurgents are distributing the weapons in order to have images of a dead Iraqi five-year-old, killed by American bullets, show up on al-Arabia or CNN. As far as I can tell, there's no proof of this, but it has the trappings of yet another brilliant PR strategy on the part of the insurgents--something that, if successful, would mean one more obstacle towards elections in January.

But putting the politics aside, there's something more interesting in this story. Why would a society that has known nothing but violence for the past generation--from the Iran-Iraq war to the regime of Saddam, to the current quagmire--become so enamored with the icons of their suffering? Why would Iraqi children, some of whom have probably seen more violence than any American kid watching FCC-regulated television, not be scarred by even the sight of a toy AK-47? Maybe it's simply that universal urge in all young boys to want to be warriors--even I, a rabid pacficist, played soldier when I was younger. Children don't quite fully grasp war, perhaps even when it's right in front of them, because they don't quite fully grasp mortality.

On this day, the outset of the holiday shopping season, I propose an American-Iraqi toy exchange program . Iraqi children would mail their toy guns to American children, and in exchange American children would send over their Gameboys, their board games, their stuffed animals, their soccer balls. We have plenty of peace over here, and over there they don't have enough. Top that, Santa.

posted by ata' allah at-talib @ 8:27 AM