Of course both of these things are terrible.
Apologists for any of these horrors need to go to their rooms and think about what they have done. They should not be seeking the audience of the public, rather the forgiveness of their god.
I hope everyone reads your post. It is the essence of what is at stake here- our humanity.
There is a reason fanatics of all stripes decry humanism. Valuing every human life is inconvenient to them. Being human requires thinking and reflecting. Being a fanatic just requires blindly following a set of rules regardless of their applicability, and if the outcome is undesirable, they just have to fix blame on those who do not obey. With that mindset, people are capable of unspeakable horrors.
There are situations when we must defend against this sociopathy.
The Iraq War is not one of those.
None of this horror in Iraq was necessary.
Bush has bungled our response to September 11, and caused a chain of misery. Who knows where it will end? America had the sympathy if not the support of most of the world after 9/11. This ill-conceived administration has squandered it for reasons that we can only surmise.
The truth about their motives may never fully be known.
It will take decades to repair the damage done by their greed and incompetence.
All of this is no excuse for trying to minimize the atrocity of Nick Berg being murdered by psychopathic fanatics.
Our responsibility as Americans is to live up to our BEST principles in response to terror. We had the wrong leadership for that, certainly. But the rhetoric of opposition to the White House, in order to be effective, must be well considered, thoughtfully expressed, truthful, and moral. We can learn from the tactics of the neo-cons, but we must stay true to our principles.
I admit I would not be surprised if there turns out to have been some spin put on this murder by the White House. That is what they do. But it does us NO GOOD to speculate about it. Later it will be clear that it wouldn't have happened if our foreign policy had been conducted differently.
Right now, The Berg family is suffering.
Being REACTIONARY about the political significance of these horrors is inhumane and cruel, not to mention counterproductive.
War is always terrible. It brings out the worst in human behavior in ways that persist long after it is over. The best attempts to compartmentalize the brutality of it will never be completely successful. The phrase "war crimes" is, in the literal sense, redundant.
We in the US are taught that our motives in war are clean, and that we are not the aggressors. This war in Iraq is not the first of our military adventures to reveal hypocrisy in our rationale, but it is surely the most dramatic example of it in generations.
If we expect to change the way America works with the rest of the world, we must have new leadership in Washington. We won't get it by letting the neo-cons frame the discussion. They excel at setting up political dynamics to marginalize their opponents. They will turn every gray area and nuance into an opportunity to demonize progressives and secure control of the thought processes of the public.
When we react thoughtlessly, they use our emotional reactions to misrepresent us. It takes a cool head to avoid their traps.
We must keep our eyes on the prize instead of falling for this false dichotomy. ALL atrocities are unacceptable, no matter who does them. We do not need to trivialize or justify one evil in order to condemn another evil.
I'm not suggesting we should blithely ignore the workings of the Bush attack machine, but we need to be principled and smart about it. We do not need to respond, react, or defend all the time. The Republican Party is controlled by ruthless people who will put their immense financial resources into any and every propaganda technique to lie to the public. They have people whose only task is to sit around figuring out multi-media scenarios for spinning and outright lying, in response to any contingency. If they're caught with their hands in the pension money, caught blaming underlings for executive decisions, caught lying about WMD, caught lying about air quality, caught lying about education, caught lying about jobs, or caught lying about lying,they can always make enough noise to distract people or at least cast doubt on the perceptions of what they've done. If they can provoke unreasoned reactions from us we will say and do things that they can distort for their own purposes.
Speculating about the manifestations of Bush's Machiavellianism is a waste of energy and resources. We need to focus on what is provable. Whether there is a hidden agenda at work in the news about the murder of Nick Berg is not what we need to talk about. The Bush White House would love for us to fixate on that sort of story, because it alienates the casual observer and makes liberals and progressives seem flaky.
We need to live by our principles and make it clear that we are doing so. If we take back the White House(and the Congress?!), that is what will be required to succeed in government. We need to show that we can exercise discipline and follow conscience. We know that our principles are good, because they are based on the Constitution and human dignity. How can we best demonstrate THAT to the majority of voters?
If this election cycle is about who has the worst atrocities, the Neo-cons will prevail.
We have to make it about reality instead. Cause and effect. All of these recent events are abominable. Why are they happening? How can we fix these problems?
If we allow Bush to side track us and he is reselected, this miserable war will only be a fore-glimpse of the ideological debauchery that will ensue. Our duty is to prevent that, and we can best work to that end by being DIFFERENT from the liars that are governing now.
Here is a link (copy and paste into your browser) to a page you may want to read and share with others.
It is astonishing how this writing by Mark Twain clarifies the mind on the morality of war. Presidents should be required to read it aloud in public before invading another country:
http://lexrex.com/informed/otherdocuments/warprayer.htm
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