Looking at the images on the site posted by Cyetain below is incredibly sobering. Does the fact that there is great human suffering occurring in Iraq negate the potential necessity for military action? It does not. It does, of course, raise a certain cost/benefit problem. It also makes one wonder how there is any possibility that America will come out of this thing with anything less than 1000% more enemies than we had before we engaged in Iraq.

A more pressing question now, however, has to do with the images themselves. What do we owe the young American men and women who are captured in these images? What do we owe the Iraqis? As citizens on the home front do we have a duty to at least witness what is going on in Iraq?

Is it appropriate that the major American news outlets have completely avoided showing America what is happening in Iraq? If you are a supporter of the Bush administration, do you believe that providing wider distribution of images like these would undermine or build support for the administration's policies?

Upon reviewing these images, I, for one, was overcome with hatred for the insurgents. Set aside the arrogance of this statement for a moment and consider it simply as true or false: If there wasn't an insurgency than Iraq would very likely be the scene of some rather different images.

There would have been no prison torture, no Fallujah. Micro and macro free markets would be springing up in every corner. In a nutshell: an open society.

Of course, there is an insurgency, and, of course, everyone but Bush and his supporters knew there would be.

- posted by Simon Marcus @ Wednesday, January 12, 2005