 
Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old American who was savagely murdered in Iraq on Saturday by a man the Central Intelligence Agency believes is Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is shown in an October 2003 photo (above) and in a still from a video made by his kidnappers in Iraq (below). On Tuesday a video of Berg's murder by decapitation, titled "Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughters an American infidel with his own hands," was posted on an Islamic Web site. The Associated Press notes that "U.S. authorities consider al-Zarqawi an ally of [Saudi Arabian-born] Osama bin Laden and say he is running his own terrorist operation."
Lamb to the slaughter
As I type this sentence, today I have received almost 700 hits from people who apparently want to watch the grisly video of Nick Berg's execution.
As the hits rolled in, at first I was cynical. People just want to watch a snuff film, I thought. But maybe, I think now, Americans have a need to see what the true costs of this war are.
Until recently, the Second Bush War in Iraq had been sanitized; war had been made to seem to be like a videogame. The "embedded" reporters concept was bullshit, as mainstream journalists weren't the watchdogs that they are supposed to be but were cheerleaders for the Bush regime who celebrated the inevitable "victory" over Iraq like you would celebrate the inevitable victory of an NFL team over a junior-high-school flag football team. And the "embedded" reporters were too embedded to ask such silly questions as, "Why are we doing this? Why are the Iraqis our enemy and why are we killing them?" And the Bush regime, after all, has forbidden the photography of even closed caskets, and the unpleasant images from within Iraq that we've seen of late didn't come from the White House or the Pentagon.
When the news of Nick Berg's execution first broke, I was cynical (which is my usual state of being). What was an American civilian -- a Jewish American civilian, it turns out -- doing in Iraq if he didn't absolutely have to be, unless it were about big money? Berg was, after all, as The Associated Press called him, "a self-employed telecommunications businessman." Berg's family members told the media that he was in Iraq to help the Iraqi people, but I was highly skeptical; he was there to get rich, I suspected. Media reports that Berg had supported the Bush regime and the Second Bush War in Iraq didn't make me feel any less cynical. I don't think that anyone deserves to die the way that Nick Berg did, but at the same time, from the information I had about him and the circumstances of his death, I wasn't going to shed a tear for businessman and Bush supporter Nick Berg, who was stupid enough to be in Iraq in the first place.
Then, I watched the video.
And it didn't matter what Berg's motivation or motivations for being in Iraq were. It didn't matter that he had thought that the Second Bush War in Iraq was a swell idea. Vanished also my notion that anyone who was stupid enough to be in Iraq in the first place...
In the video, Berg sits quietly on the floor while known terrorist and murderer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, standing with four other masked people, reads a rambling statement behind Berg. (The AP reports that the "lengthy statement...criticizes Islamic scholars and the 'shameful photos' of the humiliation of men and women at the Abu Ghraib prison.") As he sits obediently on the floor while al-Zarqawi sermonizes, Berg doesn't appear to have a clue as to what is about to happen to him.
When he is finished reading his rant, al-Zarqawi produces from his clothing a knife. He grabs Berg by the hair, throws Berg to the ground and proceeds to cut off Berg's head, which takes a while because it's not a very big knife, not the kind of knife that you would think would be used for a live decapitation, anyway. (When you think "decapitation" or "beheading," you think of guillotines or huge axes, so that although it's nasty, it's quick. In the Berg video, it's very nasty but not nearly quick enough.)
Horrifyingly, Berg appears to have several seconds of terrified awareness that al-Zarqawi is cutting his throat, and the confusing mix of the sounds of Berg's screaming (which, thank God, doesn't last very long), of a sickening gurgling that Berg makes while al-Zarqawi removes his head, and of the loud, frenzied chant of Berg's murderers of "Allahu Akbar!" ("God is great!") is about as unsettling as are the visuals. ("God is great!" -- what a wonderful thing to chant while you are cutting off someone's head.)
Then, for effect, one of the five people shown in the video (they're calling them five men, but at least one of the five masked people to me looks like it could be a woman, if they allow women to participate in such things) holds up Berg's head like a trophy for the camera. The head doesn't look real, looks like a movie prop, but I've never seen a severed head, so I wouldn't know how a severed would look. The head is then ghoulishly placed atop Berg's body, which is face down on the ground with a large pool of bright-red blood expanding from Berg's neck.
These images -- not those images of "President" Monkeyboy in a flight suit a year ago -- are probably what I and millions of others will remember most about the Second Bush War in Iraq.
If indeed it was his intention to help the Iraqis, Nick Berg might have helped them more than he thought he could, although certainly not in the way he thought that he might.
I have seen nothing draw Americans' attention away from "reality" television (the new opiate of the masses) and to the events in Iraq like Berg's horrific murder.
Yes, it's pathetic that the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians over the past year-plus apparently haven't much disturbed most Americans, who seem to view those deaths as an "unfortunate" (wink-wink) but "necessary" part of the Bush regime's "war on terror" -- even though 15 of the 19 Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, like their ringmaster, Osama bin Laden, and not one of them was from Iraq; even though there is no demonstrated link between bin Laden's terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, which is responsible for 9/11, and Saddam Hussein or Iraq; and even though not a single alleged weapon of mass destruction has been found in Iraq since the Bush regime's year-plus occupation.
That one American's death rouses Americans' interest and outrage but that hundreds of dead Iraqi babies and children barely registers on most Americans' radar confirms my belief that Americans, perhaps especially those Anglo-Americans who live in the "red states," don't consider Iraqis and other Middle Easterners to be fully human, but to be somewhere on the spectrum between people and animals, probably closer to the animal side of the spectrum. (That belief certainly would explain Americans' treatment of Iraqi and Afghan and other Middle Eastern detainees, the majority of whom are determined to be innocent -- when and if they're lucky enough even to be charged.)
But, if the gruesome death of one American wakes Americans up from their Kool-Aid-induced stupor, I'll take it.
Now that Americans seem to be at least somewhat awake -- it's too early to say whether they will stay awake or just go right back to sleep -- I see at least two possibilities for the United States in the wake of Nick Berg's murder:
As the Republican chickenhawks (that's redundant) would very much like us to do, we can militaristically engage militant fundamentalist Muslims in Iraq (and probably elsewhere in the Middle East) in the tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye spilling of blood that could go on indefinitely, just like that of the Israelis and the Palestinians. The chickenhawks would love that, because that's even more war profiteering for them and their frat buds, and it's not like their children are going to be put in the way of a bullet or a bomb, and because they're filthy rich, they won't be personally affected by the fact that there is no social safety net because most of the taxpayers' money is going to the chickenhawks' bogus perpetual "war on terror." The chickenhawks will keep asking for billions and billions of the taxpayers' dollars for their perpetual "war on terrorism," as they just fucking did -- again. (Use the taxpayers' money to create terrorists and then use the taxpayers' money to claim you are protecting them from the terrorists that you created. Really nice gig, if you can get it, like Dick Cheney's Halliburton and other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp did.)
Or, we Americans can take a long, hard look at why we are in Iraq. We can ask ourselves some simple questions that our corporately controlled mainstream media rarely, if ever, ask: What did Iraq do to us to warrant our invasion and occupation of it? Even if we drink freely of the "preemption" Kool-Aid, what threat did Saddam Hussein's regime pose to us after all? Even the misguided doctrine of "preemption" requires good reason to "preemptively" attack. What good reason did the Bush regime have to "preemptively" attack Iraq?
Is whatever the fuck it is that we are supposed to have achieved or supposedly will achieve in Iraq worth the thousands of lives that have been lost and the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars that are going to Cheney's Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp -- billions and billions of dollars of our money that instead could have gone to health care, education, environmental conservation, infrastructure, hell, even for national defense in case there is a real threat to us (and not just an opportunity for a no-bid government contract for Halliburton)? Except for BushCheneyCorp and its many subsidiaries, who exactly benefits from the Second Bush War in Iraq?
How many years will it take for us Americans to recover from the global black eye that the Bush regime has given us? How many years will it take us to eliminate George W. Bush's record-smashing federal budget deficit, caused in no small part because of out-of-control military spending meant not to protect us but to make a handful of stupid, rich and powerful white men even richer and more powerful?
We can answer these questions honestly, swallow our pride and back the hell out of Iraq. No feet-dragging -- no members of the Bush regime continuing to make excuses as to why the Iraqis "need" us to continue to occupy their nation, since we destroyed it. No postponing Iraqi self-rule -- true Iraqi self-rule, not a puppet government made up of Iraqi sellouts that does the bidding of the United States, which the Bush regime clearly is trying to install -- just because Halliburton hasn't sucked up the last taxpayer's penny that it could from Gee Dubya's Iraq Venture.
While we work on getting out of Iraq, we also need to work on getting rid of war criminal George W. Bush and his criminal cabal of aiders and abettors. To believe that the members of the Bush regime, who got us into this fucking mess, are the ones to get us out of it is as smart as returning to the same surgeon who botched your operation in the first place.
Once we're no longer occupying Iraq and once Bush is back at the ranch in Crawford on a permanent vacation from the White House -- he belongs in a prison cell, but rich and powerful white men rarely end up behind bars -- then we can begin the real work of cleaning up George W. Bush's many messes, foreign and domestic. We will owe Iraq reparations, although, if I know the United States, and I think that I do, Iraq is highly unlikely to ever see them, and although, if another nation were to "liberate" us Americans from our tyrant in the fashion that we Americans "liberated" Iraq from its tyrant, we sure the hell would demand reparations.
You don't want to hear this, but you need to hear this: All of this -- this is what we get for letting Team Bush steal the White House in late 2000. I remember watching in shock and awe as the majority of Americans made barely a peep when a presidential election was stolen right out from under them. It was the largest blow to democracy that I'd seen in my lifetime, yet most of my fellow Americans, still wallowing in the Clinton-era prosperity that afforded them their SUVs and super-sized meals and 300 channels of cable TV, just fucking allowed Team Bush to orchestrate a hostile takeover of the Oval Office as though it would have no repercussions down the road whatsofuckingever.
What we're experiencing now is what they call karma.
Now, it's up to us to decide whether we are going to neutralize our negative karma by truly helping the Iraqis by getting out of their nation and by giving them the reparations that they deserve -- or whether we are going to accrue even more negative karma by continuing to harm the Iraqi people by overstaying the welcome that it appears we never really had in the first place and that we certainly don't have now.
In short, it's up to us to determine whether or not Nick Berg died in vain.
P.S. On al-Zarqawi: Obviously, this man is an evil coward and is no man of Allah. Al-Zarqawi is all about himself. I don't believe that he gives a shit about the Iraqis or anyone else; I believe that his involvement in the situation in Iraq is little to nothing more than egotistical opportunism.
Berg not only was outnumbered, but his hands and feet were bound. He didn't have a chance. Only a fucking coward would do what al-Zarqawi did to a defenseless human being, and only an evil man would kill another human being unless it was in clear self-defense or in clear defense of others from almost certain death.
The horrific treatment of Iraqi and other detainees under the Bush regime in its "war on terror," which apparently includes several wrongful deaths, is inexcusable, and those who are responsible should be brought to justice. Al-Zarqawi had no moral authority to make Nick Berg pay for those wrongs with his life.
I hope that al-Zarqawi is found soon and brought to justice. However, I am against the death penalty ("Christians," read your New Testament and tell me exactly where it indicates that Jesus would execute anyone) and, as I indicated, an eye-for-an-eye thing between American military forces and "insurgents" in Iraq would be as productive as is the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only more innocent people would die and there would be no end in sight.
Al-Zarqawi needs to be brought to justice and the United States needs to get the fuck out of Iraq.
And say a prayer for or send some loving energy to 20-year-old U.S. Army reservist Keith Maupin of Ohio, who remains a hostage in Iraq:
11:04:26 PM 
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