Bart,
Thanks for your comments. Weather these people are soldiers are not is really not material. Some of them were, some weren't. Some were in uniform. The uniform of a defeated regime, but again, that's not particularly relevant. These were individuals fighting against us; the enemy, but never the less, human beings.
To kill one's enemy is part and parcel with fighting one's enemy. Celebrating victory is appropriate. Urinating in the gouged eyeballs of one's enemy or drinking a toast in their blood, is not. Simply because we fight and kill, doesn't mean that we need to celebrate the numbers or the loss. Only the victory.
I didn't know a soul among the dead, but I also suspect that no one else here did, either. How does one classify them as "scum?" To my knowledge, they were unknown combatants with weapons who lost an encounter. I am relieved, and pleased to hear that we survived this encounter, but I am always respectful of the loss of life to either side.
If we rise up in defense of our farms and fields, standing shoulder to shoulder in flannel shirts with Marlin lever action rifles and Ruger carbines...farmers and not soldiers who lose lives in the face of combat, does that make our own deaths any less meaningful? Hardly. It places us in the face of being defenders fighting because we see fit to fight.
These aren't mercenaries who have come to fight because it's a great living. These are people who hate us as a country, as a political entity, as an invading force.
We invade and ruin countries, and then pull out. It's what we do. It's what we're known for doing. We rally people behind us, let them go to war, and leave them hanging. We promise help, meet our own objectives, and then leave the masses to die...much like we did ten years ago, flying overhead long columns of Kurds who were being gassed and shelled and shot...people who rose up at the request of our president, and then died as our president didn't lift a finger to help them.
We wonder why these people don't like us? Arabs in general? It's a complex issue on many levels, but the bottom line for them right now, in that place, is that we we fought a "war" and are occupying their country. Is that reason enough to strike back, to rebel, and to fight and die? It's been good enough since the inception of our own country and constitution. Let it be no surprise that it's equally motivating to an arab.
Let's face it; we're lying in our own filth; the true terrorists we brought here and trained on our own shores, taught them in the deserts of Nevada and Arizona, and then sent them home with weapons and personnel to spread their craft. It suited our purposes at the time to train Osama himself...and now we've obliterated two countries (one, the poorest on earth) to clean up our own defecation.
We have young, honorable servicemen doing a job weather they wish to or not, carrying out orders and their duty with distinction. We have families losing their sons and husbands and fathers to a very indistinct and intangible front (the bush-conjured "war on terror"), in places we perhaps ought not be.
We have a commander in chief who continues to lie to the public, with a straight face, and a public who follows him like love-hungry lemmings when he pulls stupid publicity stunts such as flying to Iraq, or landing on a carrier (at the taxpayer expense).
We have a war fought not because we need to be there, but because it, and the circumstances which dictated it, were created by our own adminsitration as a failing to do what was promised in campaign slogans and talks. We have the real time enactment of the imaginary tale told in the movie Canadian Bacon; a war and an enemy has been fabricated, and we are fighting and dying out of rage from acts that had their birth on this side of the pond.
We are taking pleasure and mirth and the death and suffering of others. The truth is, it sickens me.
