Back home, the alert goes: If you’re not outraged,you’re not paying attention.

In Bagdhad, at Al Kindi Hospital Emergency, Fatima Abdullah is screaming in outrage: “Why do you do this to us??!”

Her eight-year-old, Fatehah, is dead; two other daughters are on stretchers, wounded by a missile that crushed their uncle’s home where they were staying outside Baghdad,near the Diala Bridge. An extended farming family, they have suffered with sanctions and economic devastation shrinking their stock of animals to one cow, a donkey and chickens, They are barely able to feed themselves.

Muhammed, the four year old crying in Fatima’s arms, has cuts from shrapnel and debris criss-crossing the right side of his face and head, eyelids swollen shut.

Nada Adnan, thirteen and a student at a high school for girls, tells me: “I wish that God would take Bush. Why did he do this to us? To me?” She has an open gash on her right cranium with an underlying fracture and a large, deep shrapnel-gauged cut in her upper-left thigh. She has no narcotic relief and cries out as aides press gauze into her leg wound.

Rana Adnan, nine, needs oxygen for a chest laceration and lung contusion with a concussion, head laceration, and shrapnel in her left arm.

There is also Nahla Harbi, who was a passenger driving away from Baghdad with her two-year-old in her arms when a military school for boys was hit and the explosion rolled the car fracturing both of her legs. Her child sustained head injuries.

The list keeps going on. A seventy-year-old man shopping for food for his family now has a compound fracture of his left upper arm, chest wound through his lung requiring a chest tube and making communicating difficult.

He has rage and opinions, just as the multitude of families do these days as Baghdad is relentlessly bombed. How can I explain reasons to them? They know that the Bush Administration is interested in oil control and that they have no interest in democracy for Iraqis. “Why don’t Americans know this? Why did we elect this man without human feelings?” they ask.

It’s not easy being an American in a Baghdad Emergency room seeing victims and their families. I wish that George Bush were here to answer their outrage.