[mburbank]

Okay, that's just crap Kev. I appreciattte you've developed an enoprmous chip on your shoulder due to the Bad hippies and lefty Bloggers that scared you in a gas station restroom somewhere, but they ain't me, Ziggy, or any of the people here with brains.

You want to fight the Bad hippies and bloggers because it's easy. Who here (and this is where we are, this is I-mock, not one of thse terrifying lefty blogs you read, and I, by the way do not) said that individual attrocities committed by individual us soldiers is refelctive of the army?

I'll go out on a limb and say that there's some degree of trickle down when the secretary of defense so obviously couldn't give a crap, the Presidents lawyers call the geneva conventions quaint and the justice department turns out to have no conrete evidence against Jose Padilla that would stand up in court after three years of holding him in a navy brig without charge. But Just because I think this fish rots from the head down doesn't mean I think the vast majority of soldiers are doing anything but what they think is their job, and doing it the best they can.

That being said, no matter how awful it may be that an alleged soldier got their alleged head allegedly cut off doesn't make him a non combatant, and an allegedly little girl and an allegedly old man in an alleged wheel chair allegedly executed with alleged bullets to their alleged heads aren't combatants.

Violent, uneccesary death is awful, and is only just barely moderated by soldiers signing up for the possability. Children don't.

Me personally? I think the difference between cutting the head off someone even if you think, even if you hope they aren't soldiers is just so many degrees of morality away from dropping a bomb on a building you think might have a bad guy in it and just not caring if it's full of other people, or dropping a bomb from the air and not really knowing who's getting turned into hamburger.

I think there's an attitude, shared by most americans of both parties, that what we do in war is civilzed and almost dainty compared to the unwashed barbarians.

Yes, on the whole Ilsamic extremists are way nastier than Americans. They want to enslave and control and destroy in ways only the most extreme Americans want to, and thank God our cultural standards don't allow for it. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty of killing people, we will always kill more and more effectively for the simple reason we can afford to. We will never, ever kill someone by cutting their head of, because that's declasse. No one should fuck with us. We might just go off an invade some uninvolved country.