Has the War Made Us Safer?

[dArKeR]

By Christopher Dickey and John Barry
Newsweek

April 12 issue - A year ago this week, U.S. Marine Cpl. Edward Chin scaled the long arm of a tank-recovery vehicle to put a noose around the neck of Saddam Hussein's statue. Then he put an American flag over the dictator's metallic face, and for a few minutes, live around the world, that was the image television viewers saw of Iraq's liberation. A rumor spread, even on the airwaves, that this was the American flag that had flown over the World Trade Center before terrorists brought it down. That wasn't true, but the fiction felt good. Then Old Glory was taken away, and the Marines used their cranelike vehicle to topple the giant tyrant. Iraqis jumped up and down on the statue, beating it with their shoes, dismembering it, dragging it through the streets, and for a long moment, just then, most of us felt a little safer.

Today you don't see many American flags in Iraq, except on soldiers' uniforms. (From the very beginning of the invasion, in fact, U.S. commanders decided the Stars and Stripes might offend local sensibilities.) And last week a mob in the dusty Iraqi town of Fallujah gave us a new and horrifying image to remember this war by, murdering four American civilian security men, burning them, butchering them, dragging them through the streets, then hanging pieces of them from power lines and the girders of a bridge.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4661300/

[finn]

1. safey is only in your mind

we are not safe in this world than we are safe in our own streets