The beheadings are a response to the ways the occupation forces are conducting themselves vis a vis Iraqi prisoners AND Iraqi citizens, regardless of the Iraqi's innocence or guilt. That is the message the beheading jihadists are sending to us, and it is extremely effective. Anyone who thinks those beheading videos are for the benefit of recruiting more fodder for the fundamentalist jihad is nuts. Those videos are to make American TV viewers react just like Big Mick and JustaPicker. They are viscereal, and that is just the sort of emotional reaction they are going for. A sort of 'right back in your face, motherfuckers' counterattack to what is happening at the hands of the Americans and Brits and their 'coalition of the willing'.

It's all war porn, orchestrated and disseminated to elicit pwoerful responses that are unthinking, uncritical, and reactionary. Just as the dragging of the bodies of the American contractors was pornographic. War pornography sells, and that is why both sides--us and them--are using it to such devastating effect.

Neither side is all goodness and righteousness or evil and perverse. Both sides in every war manifest this grey-area moral ambiguity. Just as that is the nature of war, so is it the nature of war pornography.