I am enraged. I am saddened, angry and hopelessly lost in the face
of the barbarism of these beheadings. I don’t know why I did, but I
downloaded the Armstrong video. And, I felt like a witness to an
inhumanity that up to now you only read about and intellectualize. This
will leave an imprint of horror on my mind far greater that I have ever
possibly imagined.

In my tired emptiness, I read some of the reactions on various
blogs. I am still stunned by the rationalization of the war on Iraq
that continues to be offered by conservative apologists.

Here’s one from rightonred.net:

1. Saddam was in violation of over a dozen UN resolutions
2. He refused to fully cooperate with inspectors
3. He was known to fund terrorist activity in Israel
4. It was known that Zarqawi and other terrorists had been given shelter in Iraq
5. The Gulf War was never fully resolved (i.e., no-fly zones)
6. All the intelligence at the time, both Clinton-era and Bush-era,
plus the intel from the world community (Britain, Russia, Israel, etc)
all said that Saddam had WMD.

Given all that, I don’t know what other choice could be made. The
UN was proven useless as a deterrent to regimes like Saddam’s, and were
obviously stalling for him.

The "War on Terrorism" is a tragic fallacy of words. Why do we
continue to equivocate the war on Islamic Fundamentalism manifested as
terrorism with the war on state sponsored terrorism? They may be equal
in moral depravity but certainly, to confuse the two is to confuse the
right approaches to fighting them.

I am too angry to write….more later.