BACK TO BAGHDAD.

• Author: BURNS, JOHN F.
• Position: Iraq winning public opinion

A decade after Iraq lost the Gulf War to a U.S.-led alliance, it's winning the war of public opinion

karar is 11 years old, his sister Nawaz just 8. Together, they work at a brick kiln in an arid hinterland about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, Iraq, close to the border with Iran. All day long they lead bone-thin, miserable-looking donkeys back and forth between the kiln and a massive brick pile 300 yards away.

The children started working at the kiln, alongside their parents, at age 5. Neither has ever been to school, and, in all probability, neither will ever go. They have only one set of clothes each, ragged and covered with grime from the desert dust and the thick, black, acrid smoke from the kilns. They work eight hours a day, six days a week, and get no vacations.

In their tiny, airless brick house, meals consist of a thin, gruel-like soup, and something that looks like a stodgy porridge. They have no television, no radio, and if they live out their lives like their parents, they will always work at the kiln, perhaps rising to positions as brick loaders, or kiln firers.

MISERY ON $1 A WEEK

For their work, Karar and Nawaz earn the equivalent of $1 a week each, enough to buy a bag of oranges or a carton of eggs. If they don't complain, it is probably because they have never known any other kind of life. "This is where we belong," says Karar.

In Iraq, at the start of the 21st century, tens of thousands of children live in the sort of conditions that scandalized 19th-century Britain when Charles Dickens wrote about them in novels like Oliver Twist. Although child laborers also endure hardships in other poor countries, Iraq is unique in that the problem is blamed squarely on another country--the United States.

In August 1990, Iraqi troops invaded neighboring Kuwait, remaining until an American-led military alliance drove them out in the 1991 Gulf War. Since then, Iraq has been isolated from the world by sanctions that limit the amount of oil it can sell, prohibit any trade in material that could be used to build weapons, and bar its air force from entering designated "no-fly" zones. The sanctions, imposed by the United Nations, were to be lifted only if Iraq allowed international weapons inspectors to verify that it is no longer building weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons--something Iraq has consistently refused to do.

It was the U.S. that pushed for the sanctions, and today there is almost no misery--no matter how deeply rooted, how seemingly unrelated to the events of 1990-91--that is not blamed on the U.S.

"All this is the responsibility of America," an Iraqi information-ministry official says at the kiln. "These children are working here because of the economic crisis...