Let's start the healing with Iraq's wounded kids by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 04-20-2003 Bring them here. That little girl I saw on the BBC with the blood seeping through filthy bandages where her left leg used to be: Bring her here. That 11-year-old boy with his face scorched into suppurating blisters, his eyes glittery with fear: Bring him here. That trembling woman lifting the shredded stump of a hand: Bring her here. Bring them all here, the injured and maimed children of Iraq who had the terrible luck to live in a place run by murderous adults. Bring us those without doctors or nurses or medicines or blood plasma. Bring us those whose hospitals have been destroyed by rampaging mobs. Write down the names of their relatives and their addresses, if any, so they can someday be taken home. But get them here now. Get them to New York, the city that has helped more human beings than any city in history. Have them greeted at our airports by an army of mercy and succor: doctors, nurses, psychologists. Rush the worst cases directly into surgery with the greatest doctors in the world. Our doctors. Heal them. Save their lives. Restore some semblance of childhood. Be true to the ancient command to comfort the afflicted. Don't tell me there is no money for such a project. There is endless money for weapons. There is endless money for waging war. So we can start waging peace right here, no matter what the cost. If the government insists it has no money, then we can pay for this ourselves. The readers of this newspaper, for example, could create a fund to take care of the basics. Doctors and nurses would almost surely volunteer their time. In spite of all the stereotyping, doctors didn't choose their profession to get rich. They'd have prospered more grandly as investment bankers or oilmen. They became doctors to heal human beings. Nurses become nurses to provide care and comfort to the injured. They are permanent members of the party of life, not the party of death. They would do this work with glad hearts. Night after night, we see the unspeakable suffering of the innocents in Baghdad and Najaf and Nassiriya, knowing that some horrors are so dreadful we never get to see them. Not one of those collateral casualties of war was in the inner circle of dictator Saddam Hussein. Not one of them worked on chemical weapons. Not one of them operated a torture chamber. Not one of them had a relative in those airplanes 9/11 either, because not a single one of the murderous fanatics of that day was an Iraqi. The maimed just happened to live in Iraq. It doesn't matter now if you think the war was about liberation or conquest. Either way, pro-war or anti-war, we can support healing. Those injured people had nothing to do with it, except to live in the wrong place in a bad time. So we should bring them here - soon. We should do this because our taxes paid for their mauling. We should do this because to refuse pity and compassion to victims is a violation of everything we mean when we say we are civilized. This doesn't have to be done with a lot of flag-waving speeches about the goodness of America. But it would show the world - and specifically the Muslim world - that not all Americans are indifferent to the wretched lives of strangers. We can take some share of responsibility for what has happened to these injured people and do all that is possible to allow them to live. The worst sin of all might be indifference to human agony. Find the airplanes. Put the damaged children on board. And get them here. Perhaps we can house them on Governors Island for as long as it takes to repair the damage. They would then wake each morning and look out at the harbor and see the statue that was once called the Mother of Exiles. That statue, after all, is the enduring vision of Americans at their very best. But we must act now. Children are dying. Originally published on April 20, 2003