American soldiers might as well have been wearing signs on their backs saying "shoot me". In their desert camo uniforms, boots, and helmets with goggles, carrying all sorts of equipment, including weapons, of course, and driving in armored, but not sufficiently armored, vehicles, everything about their appearance showed that they did not fit into the local culture; every aspect of their appearance suggested to the local culture that they were alien....
What do people do when those who claim superiority over them don't act in a morally superior way and then show vulnerability? They attack. It's human nature. Iraq may be a multi-front civil war between groups with old enmities, but one thing they have shown themselves (and said themselves) to agree on is that the Americans ought to be attacked....
As a result of the Iraq war, we should thank the Bush administration for demonstrating the futility and cruelty of war as the Pentagon and its contractors have designed it. The Pentagon could have looked around in the fifties and seen that insurgencies were the wave of the future, but they didn't--they invested in something more expensive and more risky, and now we and our children are once again paying the price....
Secular western civilization, in my view, is valuable and worth preserving, but when we "fight for it" in Bush's terms, with contravention of such legal protections as habeas corpus, breaking down the separation of church and state, interference in scientific research for the sake of ideology, or torture, we wreck it ourselves....
Ouch! You can go back and look at her previous posts as well. I, of course, think she is a little over-the-top in her anti-capitalism. One can interpret her critique (as in the previous posts as well) as a valid one of untrammeled, unbalanced capitalism.
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