The title is a quotation from Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden. In my painting, the central figure is supported by a US soldier struggling to push a Bradley Fighting Vehicle up a slope (The BFV is manufactured by the Caterpillar Corporation). The pilot is surrounded by the circle and square from Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man, which demonstrates the perfect symmetry of the Humanist ideal. This figure, is, however, off balance. His lower part is naked to emphasise his own inevitable vulnerability; he wears an expensive cashmere sweater in RAF blue and a combat pilot’s helmet. The clouds in the sky which he occupies are innocent and schematic in the style of a Mabel Lucy Attwell illustration, but his arm which is dropping cluster bombs is skeletal. The configuration of the cluster bombs, which I obtained from a website called The Ordnance Shop, is similar to that of condoms. The bombs are falling onto the half-tone area, the media image, which depicts in its lower half two Iraqi soldiers in a slit trench with the tops of their heads blown off. They have primitive military equipment – you can see their steel helmets lying about. They have a rudimentary flag of surrender made from a piece of white cloth knotted onto a stick which has evidently proved to be ineffective. Above them is Little Ali. During an early bombardment his entire family were killed and he had his arms and legs blown off. For a while Little Ali received a great deal of sympathetic media attention, but we do not know where he is now. He still has the rest of his life to live.