Poster Boy for War

Just when you thought American TV couldn't stoop any lower, now we have the plight of Ali Abbas, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who lost both of his arms, along with his parents, three siblings and ten other relatives, in a missile strike on Baghdad. Now he has become "a redemption story, the kind we like," muses Joan Walsh. The U.S. military has flown him to Kuwait, where reporters are breathlessly following his medical treatment. "But some of the stories have tried to deal with an uncomfortable fact. Ali is, um, well, he's angry at the U.S. for killing his family," Walsh writes. "And American journalists have been flummoxed by how to report on his feelings." CNN hit bottom Wednesday morning, when anchor Kyra Phillips asked Ali's physician, "Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?"