There is no way we can forget that little child whose skull was ripped open. He lies on the ground serene in death while the upper part of his skull is open as if the explosion had occurred inside his brain. He is safe from explosions now; yet a nation suffers the legacy. He joins Mohammad Al-Durra, the other Arab child, who was similarly slaughtered by the same arms and the same manufacturers on the streets of Palestine hiding behind his father for protection.

An adolescent boy, sitting up on his sickbed, one arm amputated while the other flashes the sign of victory, gives the world a stare that is as damning as the words of Mercutio on both houses of Verona: “A plague o’ both your houses!” He might have suffered under Saddam, but his curse goes to London and Washington.

A photo of elderly women, clad in their abaya or chador, spreading their hands and being frisked by a female US Marine, made the front page of every newspaper in the Arab world on Sunday. This is an image more devastating to an Arab than a corpse mutilated by merciless bombs. The dead are safe from further humiliation, but to handle our chador-clad women in view of the world is nothing short of outrageous. The only thing that was enslaved by the liberators in that scene was the dignity and humanity of these women. These women are our archetypal mothers.

Prisoners, very much according to the Geneva Convention I’m sure, were stripped in front of the cameras. They were handled with the utmost disregard to their dignity and their humanity. Any old sack lying about would do as a hood. The plastic that is used to tie their hands is of the most durable industrial type produced by the factories of Pennsylvania. The US cried foul when they thought their prisoners were mistreated, but nothing was heard from them or their media about such scenes played endlessly on screens across the world. The millions in the Arab world watching this do not need pundits to explain anything. The pictures are worth the volumes of all human learning.

A sequence of pictures was played on television that summed up this war of liberation. A Bedouin in his pickup truck was stopped by the Marines.

They roughed him up, pulled him out of his truck, and started searching it. In the glove compartment, they found a wad of cash. The camera zoomed in as two Marines started counting the cash. They decided that he had been paid large sums of money to fight them.

They hurriedly took him into the waiting helicopter. The camera is in the helicopter with him. It fans back down to earth: The Marines are still counting the money while the pickup truck is left in desolation.

Had anyone bothered to brief those Marines about Arab life and the Bedouins, they would have known that the man had probably just made a deal, selling a camel or a few sheep and was returning home with his money.

As for the wads of cash, the Iraqi dinar has slipped so low that a bundle of it would not add up to $10. What that man had would add up to $100 at best. He also kept it in the glove compartment of his dashboard, which is typical of how Bedouins carry their money when they return from the market.

What exactly was left of that man and his life? A memory perhaps? He has disappeared forever into the mayhem of a war he did not choose.

The sight of his forsaken pickup truck diffused more sense of desolation than any burned up tank or bombed-out house.

An elderly woman was lamenting to herself. Someone stuck a microphone close enough to pick up what she was saying. “Why is this Bush so nasty?” she asked no one in particular. “Our houses shake so violently we cannot sit in them.”

She wiped her face, oblivious of the mayhem around her, and added: “They do not like us. May God curse them!”

The pictures of devastation and human suffering continue. The world watches, and so do we. There have been reports of jubilation in Israel at these pictures. Not a single network picked it up as they did the Palestinian “celebrations” after Sept. 11, which afterwards many commentators said was older film taken after a human bombing.