I think it is also fair and reasonable to remember the actual enemy, who has taken advantage of Bush's policy to make a staging area out of Iraq, a country they were once scarce in. This is what the organization that bombed the Twin Towers with stolen airplanes full of (relatively) innocent passengers is up to lately:

"Al Qaida claims hotel bombings


Al Qaida in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings of Baghdad hotels that killed 17 people.

The claim, made in an internet statement posted on a website that carries extremist material, said the attack targeted the "dirty harbour of intelligence agents and private American, British and Australian security companies."


"The lions of monotheism hit the heart of the security cordon," said the statement, which could not be immediately verified.

Tuesday's bombings targeted central Baghdad's Palestine and Sheraton hotels, which house Western journalists and contractors.

The statement said the group carried out the operation despite high-profile security measures including concrete barriers, barbed, checkpoints and surveillance cameras.

Al Qaida in Iraq said militants from its Brigade of al-Baraa bin Malek carried out the attacks.

The statement said the militants fired missiles at security forces before the suicide bombers - including one driving a cement truck through a gap blasted in a surrounding wall - detonated the explosives."

These are not freedom fighters.

They, like our own right wing fanatic Christians, are extremists using religion as a justification for anti-social psychotic acts, an insane desire to either control or destroy others, anti-human and anti-productive and grimly destructive. Individual by individual they may be less so; but when you take on the colors of a band of pirates or a pack of wolves, it is not persuasive to argue that you are basically a puppy and a family man; it is too disonant to bear much credence. Th eindividual is the responsible thrust-bearing for the acts of the group in which he participates.

I have been variously labeled as a pinko peacenik of various kinds, both in this thread and elsewhere. So I bring this issue up to point out that given the correctly identified enemy, and no other means to bring about a more amenable frame of mind on his part, I am persuaded that force may sometimes be unavoidable. But human decency requires that the effort to avoid it be made, and that the enemy be identified correctly, and that the standards of human compassion be maintained even in violence insofar as humanly possible.

Otherwise, there is no just battle; it is then all a bestial, godforsaken and rotting stew to which the vultures naturally gravitate.

Thus, W.

A