We don't want to see them because we don't want to know the unpleasant consequences of the actions that our government is taking in our name.
We want to believe that if we don't see it, then somehow we're not responsible for it.
But we are responsible for it. For starters, we didn't make a collective peep when George W. Bush and his Republican henchpeople stole the presidential election of 2000. Still basking in our Clinton-era prosperity, our immediate little universes weren't shaken -- we could still drive our SUVs, could still get our super-sized meals at the drive-throughs and could still watch our dozens of channels of television -- so we didn't do shit while our democracy was seriously subverted right before our very eyes. A stolen presidential election was, in our estimation, not such a big deal. That's politics for you! And it doesn't matter who's in office -- all politicians are alike anyway! That seemed to be the collective "wisdom" of late 2000 and early 2001.
Now, the chickens are coming home to roost -- with their heads cut off.
Let me make it clear for the Limbaugh-lovers that I oppose beheading. I oppose murder. I oppose the killing of another human being except in clear cases of self-defense and in clear cases of the defense of others, that is, in those rare cases in which others most likely will be killed imminently without intervention. (The death penalty does not meet these criteria, which is why I oppose it.)
I watched the video of 26-year-old American businessman Nicholas Berg's beheading in Iraq last month. It was, to put it mildly, disturbing.
But unless we step outside of the black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us, we're-good-and-they're-evil thinking in which the members of the neo-Nazi Bush regime consistently encourage us to engage, we are going to see more and more images like those above.
See, in March 2003 the United States invaded, and now occupies, the sovereign nation of Iraq, although Iraq did not do anything to the United States or to any of the United States' allies or even to any of its (Iraq's) neighbors to warrant the United States' invasion. And the Bush regime's lies to the world that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat turned out to be -- well, lies.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand, then, that millions of Muslims would be pretty fucking pissed off, then, that thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed since March 2003 and that the United States occupies Iraq based upon the lies that the Bush regime told the world before the invasion. And it would be understandable for Muslims living outside of Iraq to wonder if their nation were next to be "liberated" by the United States.
And you don't have to be a neurosurgeon to see that if any of these pissed-off Muslims want to retaliate against the United States' wholly unprovoked attack on and unjustified occupation of a Muslim nation, they don't have nearly the range of options that the United States military has when it wishes to retaliate (thanks to the U.S. taxpayers, whose billions of tax dollars aren't going to the things that they and their children need, but are going to "defense," which actually is not defense at all, but which is offense, and which, coinky-dinkily, just so happens to make BushCheneyCorp's war-profiteering subsidiaries, like Dick Cheney's Halliburton, billions of dollars richer).
Muslims can't make retaliatory air strikes on the U.S. military when they're pissed off. They have to resort to smaller, more personal-appearing, often (if not usually) uglier tactics -- unlike the larger, more impersonal-appearing, more sanitary-appearing killings that the U.S. military can pull off with its weapons of mass destruction. (Similarly, somehow if a poor black man holds someone up for $25 at gunpoint, this seems much worse to the average American than does an impeccably dressed rich white white-collar criminal who steals millions of dollars without a gun.)
So we don't like the Muslims' retaliatory tactics, such as hostage-taking, suicide bombings and decapitations.
But what other tactics are available to them?
Yes, Mr. Hatch, thanks to this investigation-ridden and corporatistic-minded Bush Adminstration, this war has created more terrorists who will most assuredly cause terror that will last years and possibly decades. More Americans will be losing their heads and more of our soldiers will be coming home in caskets because of their policies.
