... I imagine Bush supporters or other readers might ask "So where's all your outrage when it's Al Qaeda committing atrocities? Why are you always picking on America?" I guess my response would be that our enemies don't seem to lack for people to decry their villainy; that seems pretty covered. It's our own villainy that needs to be exposed because that's the villainy we can control and are responsible for.

"These people have no respect for life; they hide behind their own women and children!" So when we, knowing they're hiding behind women and children, proceed to blow those women and children away, well, jeez, it's not our fault --they made us!

What these pictures and those to come seem to point out another fantastic side effect of war, that cool morally corrosive effect that burns away our own decency by making us feel like we're justified in committing horror because our enemies are inhuman. We're letting them turn us into the monsters they see us as just as we're turning them into our monsters. Somewhere along the line somebody has to refuse to be a monster.

It's the whole Us-vs.-Them thing. Folks, there is no Them. We're all Us. Those that hate us, they're still part of us. Them, the enemy, they are not the enemy. The war is the enemy, and it's the common enemy of Us and Them. It's killing Us, and it's killing Them, and it's providing the open arena for every dark evil we both can conjure. And for every ante-upping "Well, see, they're even worse" bit of justification, you're just playing into the whole Us vs. Them thing that fuels the thing we should be fighting.