Boy, you hit lots of nails on the head! Your last paragraph also brings up the murky issue concerning the illegal immigrant problem. The elite pretend they are not racist, while taking selfish advantage of cheap labor, and the middle class pretend they are not racist while protesting it.

KyCole – your story is an example of what we should be hearing on the media, not the war porn that The Heretik brings to our attention, nor the “missing white women.” The experiences of the shattered families in the US and in Iraq are what we should be focusing on. But I suppose that’s caving into the enemy somehow? God, we’re warped.

Almost anything on the Republican/conservative agenda has to do with the inferiority and subjugation of other people. Women, gays, brown skinned people, people of other nations, and especially brown skinned people of other nations…they all need to be controlled or exterminated. It’s even true of workers and consumers, we’re just expendable peons. There are some average Joe conservatives who either don’t understand this, refuse to believe it, agree with it but won’t admit it, and then there are the bigots who embrace it heartily.

I’ve heard alot of liberals argue that the Republican power brokers and politicians aren’t actually racist, sexist, etc but that they are using wedge issues in a cynical way to get the base riled up. I disagree. They simply hate and fear more people than the average Republican voter. They are like the aristocracy and gentry in the Victorian ages or earlier. Their hate and fear is NOT unreasonable like the Archie Bunker types. They hate and fear anyone who is a threat to their wealth and power, which includes women, gays, brown skinned people, people of other nations, especially brown skinned people of other nations, and the worker and consumer peons.

I blame Bush (and his lackey Blair) for bringing the evil genie out of the bottle.

I blame a large chunk of the American people for their self-centred stupidity in electing and supporting a president who simply wants to make sure he and his oilmen buddies make lots of money.

I blame the Muslim world for not standing up to the ultra-violent minority amongst them who has elevated hate, torture and death to the status of religious rapture.

I wonder if there is any way to turn this behemoth of death and destruction around.

The other said his unit spent most of their time as protectors of KBR [Halliburton sub], except for some now and then meaningless [his word] drive-around patrols which he guessed were sort of ‘to show muscle’. He very clearly said, “We do not belong there.”

What I did not know until he told me was that the US military has a rule that all Iraqi traffic has to get out of the way whenever our guys are traveling….and that our soldiers are to automatically shoot any Iraqi who gets within so many meters. This includes any on-coming traffic across a median. When I asked him if all the Iraqis clearly understood the ‘new US rules of their roads’, he said sheepishly that he thought so…then went on to say that his unit did not automatically shoot those too near….first they just shot toward that vehicle. He thought that those who got too near were just ‘playing chicken’ and would usually scramble away when the shots began.
He had a laptop full of pictures, some of which I wish I had not seen. This whole thing hurts my heart. Both these soldiers are fine guys……I cannot fathom letting them die in order to ‘protect KBR’ or ‘drive patrols to show muscle’ or use bullets to enforce occupier rules of the road that lower Iraqis to second-tier status on their own roads in their own country.

America has to have a deep reckoning about our energy future, and decide whether we want to keep on strong-arming whole populations like this to acquire permanent military bases and control of oil-rich countries.

The righties want to say that we are there to fight evil terrorists….. I don’t believe that is why we are staying there……. the violence such as the horror against the journalist Atwar [what a name] would not be happening if we were really there to ’stabilize and protect the country’, because our troops would be busy on patrols to actually protect Iraqis instead of just showing muscle and protecting American corporations …….. it has always been about oil, and the terrorism issue is the perfect cover story for folks who idolize Bush and who will use any new atrocity to reinforce their head in the sand posture.

It’s difficult to escape the underlying racism of so many of the war supporters on the right: these people need us to teach them what a civil society is like, and when our (deliberately bungled and undermanned) efforts to do so don’t pan out, it must be because they’re irredeemably savage.

That’s one of the reasons George,Jr trotted out the exporting democracy spiel after it had become pretty obvious that there were no WMDs: many people who supported him undoubtedly began to feel a certain unfocused guilt about having supported an unjustifiable war, and needed to have their doubts about heir own motives and their character assuaged. Who says he’s dumb?