Syrian boy is another symbol of incalculable cost of war

When I was a kid, we played cowboys and Indians. With toy guns and imitation bows and arrows. We took our combat cues from the world of make-believe, the world Hollywood served up about the good guys and the bad guys in the Wild West. In those politically incorrect days of old, we had no doubt about who was who.

Today, in Syria and Iraq, in Yemen, Afghanistan and Libya — and soon you might have to add Turkey — children still can be seen pairing off in mock battle. But there’s no make-believe behind the game. These kids survive in a real-life state of chaos. And destruction. And displacement. And death. If they survive at all.

And it’s hard, if not impossible, to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

This was hellishly hammered home last week in Syria. Yet again.

It was in photos and video that went viral. Images of a 5-year-old in Aleppo. Of this mop-haired little boy sitting alone, framed by his intensely orange chair in an over-stressed hospital. Sitting alone after being rescued from the rubble of his home. Caked in blood and dust. Defenseless. Catatonic.

Who was responsible? Russia? Radical religious rebels? The boy’s own government? On a personal level, it’s moot. It happened.

I’m reluctant to utter the boy’s name, because it feels like I’d diminish all the other kids who’ve lost their homes, their schools, their siblings, their parents. All the other kids for whom an airstrike — or a pitched battle from door to door — robbed them of their youth. All the other kids just like this one but for one dramatic difference: the camera didn’t capture their despair.

But it doesn’t really matter whether I name him or not, because while the image might stick with you, you wouldn’t long remember the name. Can you conjure up the identity of the little boy washed up last year on a beach in Turkey? Not likely. The 2-year-old son of a Syrian family fleeing the fighting looked like he was sleeping, but he wasn’t. He was dead. That too was captured in a photograph that went viral. That too prompted global fury. Fury about the callous conduct of Middle East combatants. Fury about the desperate deluge of Middle East refugees. Fury after which … nothing changed. Yet again.

In my own coverage of conflicts, I have seen what happens to young survivors. Existence becomes a goal. Poverty becomes an expectation. Security becomes a memory. Suffering becomes a touchstone. Violence becomes a norm.

Two images forever stick with me. Neither is make-believe. In one, Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip throw stones at mockups of Israelis, spitting insufferable slogans at their unseen enemy. Some day those stones will be on fire, and those children will be out to kill. In the other, children in then-embattled Belfast, Northern Ireland, are playing their equivalent of cowboys and Indians, except it’s Catholics and Protestants. They are in an alley, slinging miniature Molotov cocktails at each other. And swearing the same foul slogans they could hear just around the corner, where a bona fide battle raged on the street. Hate was growing right there in that alleyway.

The tiny corpse on a sandy sanctuary in Turkey, the dazed child in an orange chair in Syria, the kids in Gaza and the kids in Belfast, they are part of the incalculable cost of war.

Is it avoidable? Sad to say, the answer is no. Power, greed, ideology, history, racism, religion; they, and more, are the drivers of war. So unless the failings of human nature someday disappear, we will always have warfare. And if we always have warfare, we will always have children whose lives it ruins for perpetuity. There already have been hundreds of thousands, maybe millions this time around. There will be that

many more. Yet again.