Here's another one: "liberate"

It means to achieve military occupation of by force of arms. It means to conquer.

Now, when a country is occupied by several factions hostile to one another (like Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and Kurds in Iraq), then the arrival of a foreign "liberator" will always be welcomed by whichever outfit is presently on the bottom of the heap.

In just that way, huge cheering crowds welcomed the Nazis into cities in the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and various other places in the western Soviet Union in 1941. Those crowds were angry at Stalin, just as the Shia Muslims and Kurds are angry at Saddam...but they were very naive to think they were being liberated. They were not.

The Nazis went into Soviet Russia for the same reason that the USA and the U.K. are going into Iraq...to secure valuable resources and strategic land areas. To conquer, not to liberate.

German soldiers mostly didn't know that. They genuinely believed the Nazi propaganda and saw themselves as liberators. Naturally. They believed they were the good guys.

Stalin's boys saw themselves much the same way when they came back the other way in 1944-45, pushing their way to Berlin.

And I imagine that is the way American soldiers see themselves too. Why wouldn't they, given human nature?

It's not liberation, folks. It's conquest. Call it what it is. And it is not in the interests of the young men and women who are carrying the guns and driving the equipment. Not in the least.

The Vikings were not embarrassed to admit to what they were doing when they conquered and pillaged a country, but they lived in a far simpler (and more brutal) society, and didn't need that kind of false propaganda as a motivator for their fighting men. We've taken some steps forward in sensitivity since then...people now have to be convinced that it's humanitarian to bomb and kill their foreign brothers and sisters for the cause of the hour.

Quite a list of names there, Peg! I wonder if we'll see some of them at the next Nuremberg trials?

- LH