It's a zoo out there

Would you believe, though, that this was no joke. There in full technicolor was a photograph of a US Major General, no less, petting a full-grown cheetah at the Baghdad zoo. Below it was yet another soldier with stripes on his shoulder supposedly inspecting a caged lion, except he is looking the other way.

Now I don't know about you but if the photos and catchy caption were supposed to convey a sense of normality about conditions in the wilderness that Baghdad has become, it failed. My reaction was to snigger at first, but I quickly realized that this is no laughing matter. Men and women are dying. Young soldiers are getting killed and children are being scarred mentally and physically in Iraq.

The day I received that photograph, I was holding back tears at the sight of a badly disfigured five-year-old boy who is undergoing a series of painful surgeries in the US to give him back his face. He was apparently playing outside his home in Baghdad when attackers threw gasoline over him and set him on fire. Is there anything more savage?

A cheetah may be the fastest thing on four paws but I bet that major general knew it would not leap up and attack him. Animals tend to prey on weaker species for survival, but torching children is not what they do at the zoo.

The heartless gang that attacked a helpless child must have had some easy access to gasoline if they could use it for the torture of the innocent.

Elsewhere, Iraqis have to queue for hours, if not days sometimes, for gasoline, which is more easily available on the black market than it is in the dilapidated petrol stations in the country. Strange situation for a country that sits on 115 billion barrels of crude oil reserves, but can't bring much of it out of the ground to sell because of the violence that has targeted the country's economic lifelines and those involved in the energy industry.

Iraq needs billions of dollars to rebuild and yet it cannot take advantage of record high oil prices to push more oil on to the markets and beef up its revenues. It remains a hostage of a bizarre situation where those who are supposed to protect them are having gunfights in the streets and officials are cloistered inside the high walls of the safe Green Zone.

Chatting to a colleague in Singapore, I happened to mention the photograph of the cheetah and he pointed out to me that once they are raised as tame animals they can never be released back into the wild. It struck me that in Iraq, the reverse is true. You have an entire people that had been "tamed" by a ruthless leader, the late Saddam Hussein. It would appear that unlike cheetahs, many developed a taste for blood once the Baathist wall came down.