With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt. ...

If more proof of the hypocritical selectivity of Bush's moral outrage were needed, look no further than the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when, in the name of liberating the Iraqi people, the White House gladly linked arms with a host of countries its own State Department had castigated for significant human rights violations -- including Uzbekistan, Colombia, Georgia, Eritrea, Macedonia, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, and the Dominican Republic. Given these countries' dismal human rights record, maybe we should have called them the Coalition of the Willing to Torture, Execute, and Rape.

The suddenly fashionable humanitarian justification for the war in Iraq is nothing more than yet another White House deception designed to cloak the fact that the original justification -- Iraq as an imminent threat -- hasn't panned out.

"I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster," Franklin D. Roosevelt warned as WWII loomed. Yet presidential grandfather Prescott Bush forged lucrative alliances with the Nazis anyway [ LINK ] -- and war profiteering remains a Bush family tradition. [ LINK ]Does the public realize this? Do they care? "When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs," Gore Vidal wrote, "he observed, characteristically: 'It would seem that the worse you fu*k up in this job the more popular you get.'" Perhaps that explains Bush's approval ratings? They certainly don't make sense otherwise. But then again, few things do. In many ways, tangible and not, this country isn't recognizable anymore. Take a look around. The CIA was right. The attack has been spectacular indeed.

The shaky relationship between occupier and occupied came to the fore in a confrontation Sunday morning in Fallujah, a restive town west of Baghdad that's seen a number of attacks on U.S. troops since the Americans shot and killed 20 protesters during demonstration in April.

A shouting match broke out when an Iraqi civilian, Jamal Shalal Habib al-Mahemdi, accused a U.S. soldier of stealing $600 from his car.

The soldier tried to wave the man on, but, at the behest of bystanders, his superior officer, Sgt. James A. Phillips, searched his pockets and found the money. Phillips then returned the bills to al-Mahemdi, who waved them above his head and cursed the soldier.

It was not clear if the soldier, whose name was not immediately available, would be disciplined. Maj. Sean Gibson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said he had not heard of the incident but was sure it would be investigated.

The incident was witnessed by an Associated Press photographer.