But I don't think I'm taking anything away from anyone's deep religious conviction when I point out that there are other motivating influences in people's lives, such as, for example, what comes to you as you carry the torn-up body of a girl (your daughter, your niece, your neighbor?) to stack on a waist-high pile of corpses, made by American bombs. This is the sort of motivating experience that has never been threatened by heresy, doubt or apostasy, that doesn't require ceremony or dogma or holy books, that has never had to bother with conversions or indoctrinations.
Three years after the September 11, 2001 massacres, there are still any number of Americans, not all of them warbloggers, who react with barely controlled fury to any suggestion that American policy may have played any causal role whatsoever in the atrocities of that day.
I simply wonder what has happened to humanity's conscience that such atrocities still continue. You'd think we'd learn that more suffering is bad and less suffering is good. What Saddam did to his own in no way excuses what we've done to the guilty or the innocent. Blood lust justified by people's rationalizing mentality may be the biggest problem here.
There are ways to take terrorists out without bombing children. That they victimize their own is condemned by Muslim clerics everywhere. And those who demonize Islam just aggravate the problem, since it gives the lunatic fringe a justification to demonize Christianity (and by extension, all westerners). No sane person disrespects another's God. Beliefs may differ, but when children die, all of life weeps bloody tears. And no one who is a parent could justify any child's death, regardless of who or how or whatever. Especially not something as stupid as politics or ideology.
This picture is so moving because the caring and concern on the man's face is so clear, and the damage to her leg and foot so gruesome. But let us not forget that she was but one of the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and tens of thousands of Iraqis who lost limbs or were gruesomely burned and scarred or otherwise "liberated" in this effort to... what? Defend America against imaginary weapons of mass destruction? Liberate people who from all appearances had no desire to be liberated? Why? What a waste. What a useless stupid-ass waste.
