Sickening

This Guardian article literally makes me nauseous:

For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.
"He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'"

The incident is one of a number in which US soldiers are alleged to have abused, intimidated or sexually humiliated Iraqi women.

The report goes on to note that, in violation of international law, women are taken as hostages if a male wanted for questioning is absent from the house. Whether or not they are sexually abused while in detention hardly matters--once released, these women are in danger of being beaten or killed, thanks to the religious and sexist weirdness of the local society. That said, we are no less blameworthy: it's not like the Iraqi people were begging for us to "liberate" them.

Now, thanks to the horrible death of Nick Berg, racists of all stripes are demanding nuclear justice. Arabs and Muslims once again are guilty by association, although not one of those screaming for revenge gives half a damn about these pictures, which never receive attention from the mainstream media. Judging from THOSE photos, I'd say that we've already had plenty of revenge.

Nick Berg should not have been killed and those who killed him should be brought to justice, if there is such a thing in the "new" Iraq. However, as Balta and others (including me) have noted, Bush passed on several opportunities to capture or kill Zarqawi, presumably because his presence (in Iraqi Kurdistan, i.e., outside Saddam's jurisdiction) added justification to the invasion. Berg paid the ultimate price for Bush putting politics above a rational policy.

Because there is no policy (see my link to Bad Attitudes below), and because we don't have the first clue as to what to do now that were there, sadistic acts like the killing of Berg--or the disgusting abuse of Iraqi women--will continue to play out in a this-for-that spiral until it has the destructive force of a tornado. Wrongwingers haven't even begun to realize how bad this will get.

And it's all because little Dubya and old Dick wanted a nice little war to kick off their reelection campaign.