It's intended as a sinister image, but I find it aesthetically pleasing: BBC's illustration for "US moves to crush Shia uprising". (bbc.com, 08/12/04).

The rocket propelled grenade gracefully echos the shape of the dome and minaret.

This Modern World (08/08/04): "Using the threat of terrorism to scare voters: all of September will be 'National Preparedness Month'":

It's three years after 9/11, and less than three months before an election, and now we get a National Preparedness Month.

And yes, let's ask Bush and Tom Ridge the simple question: what the hell do these people think the previous 35 months were?

Here's an excellent item that I failed to publish when it appeared back in mid-May: The Moral Case Against the Iraq War by Paul Savoy (thenation.com, 05/13/04), on the topic of belated rationalizations for the invasion of Iraq:

Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being 'better off' avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war. As the late Robert Nozick cautioned in his classic work on the moral basis of freedom, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, we should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.

(If you have an account with the Onion for "premium" services, see also "Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy", theonion.com, 03/26/03.)

When does a foreign government have the right to decided that YOUR death is an acceptable price for what it believes is the best interests of your fellow citizens in a sovereign nation? Never, obviously.

The article picks apart several of the pseudo-humanitarian war justifications belatedly asserted. It's worth a read.

Another excerpt from War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning on that last comment about history:

Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as lie. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the lie that led to it.

It's just a darned good book.