“Dr. Osama Salé quietly entered the major burns unit in the Kindi hospital and warned us: ‘You’ll now see the world’s greatest tragedy'”. In publishing the shocking photo of a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who has lost both arms and his whole family (father, mother and two brothers) as a result of the Anglo-American bombing raids on Iraq the Spanish daily El Paìs of 01/04 tells, on its front page, “the sad story of Alì”: “His parents lived in Baghdad writes the paper’s correspondent Francisco Peregil but they decided to take refuge in a little town some 15 km south of the city, in the countryside, to avoid the bombardments. They died yesterday, at two o’clock at night”. The doctor fears the boy will not survive: “The burns are too deep”. The American weekly magazine Time (7/4) dedicates what is virtually a monographic number to the Iraqi conflict. It chose for its cover the significant title “how long will it take to win?”, with the photo of a soldier scrutinizing the horizon. “How precise is the American bombardment?”, is the question posed, on the other hand, by the Herald Tribune (1/4), according to which “there’s a drawback to the continuous boasting about the surgical precision of the attacks. The expectation that every bomb will strike its objective grows and insults the world, when it doesn’t”. “Crusade” against “Jihad”? that’s the question posed by Henri Tincq ( Le Monde, 1/4), who argues that “ in response to the risks of paralysis of the war in Iraq, the feared scenario of a clash of religious type seems to be already taking place”. The Vatican expert explains his initial assumption as follows: “the Islamic movement has never been so divided before between, on the one hand, the defenders of a rapprochement with the nationalist and democratic forces and, on the other, the advocates of the ‘jihad’. But between American bible-belt fundamentalism, which is gaining ground in the Christian sphere, and Islamic fundamentalism, two visions clash, both of them based on the schematic discourses of wild exegetes and perverted sacred writers. And if the religious dimension of this war concludes Tincq is neither the most immediate, nor the most decisive, it may, in the future, serve to stoke up a fire with unpredictable consequences”. “The American wars”: is the front-page headline in another French daily, La Croix (29-30/3); it traces (in a six-page special dossier) America’s progress “from war to war”, from the conquest of Mexico (1848) to the current conflict in Iraq. The war also dominates the front pages of the German press. “ Timetable for peace” is the headline of an article in the Faz of 31/3, signed by Jörg Bremer which analyses the possible links between the Iraqi war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “ the Israeli government is opposed to the linkage between the two conflicts and does not want to pay the price of the American operation in Iraq“. On the other hand, “ Arafat too links the two conflicts” and, however much “ he tries to contain the pro-Saddam demonstrations, the Palestinian people is enflamed“. The front-page editorial in the same paper on 2/04 comments on the current stage of the conflict: “ the terrible incident in the environs of Nadjaf has shown that all wars resemble each other, that errors are committed, and that there may be terrible consequences for the population, as for the troops” and concludes, with regard to the pre-war American assessment, by affirming that “ if the difficulties of this war were disguised to obtain greater political support, that was an irresponsible attitude“. Strong criticism of George Bush has also been voiced by the German President Johannes Rau. Writing in the Financial Times Deutschland of 1/04 Jens Tartler and Joachim Zepelin comment on Rau’s intervention during a television programme, by noting that “ the harsh and explicit criticisms directed against the US President are unusual for a president”. The weekly Spiegel of 31/3 speaks of the “ Superpower in the sand the stagnant American blitzkrieg” and dedicates a series of articles to the war: “ Resistance mile after mile” on what military tactics to adopt in this phase; and “ chronic alienation” on the attitude of civilians to the American troops, “ who have find out the hard way that they are not considered liberators“.
