I’ve just finished watching the beheading of American contractor Nick Berg by jihadist insurgents in Iraq. I’ve posted the link above from The Memory Hole. If you’re easily offended, naturally queasy, or jingoistically patriotic, maybe you should skip this post.

Some people would think it is disgusting and perverted of me to go seek out something like that. Bad enough that one of our boys gets his head chopped off, worse that he was essentially a civilian, not a military man who’d signed up for hazardous duty.

But I’ve just got this insatiable need to see things for myself. You can’t handle the truth? I can. I want to see the whole, naked, unvarnished truth of what’s going on in this war. “War is hell” is just a pithy saying, and it makes it too easy to dismiss the horror of war. It is images like the charred bodies hanging from the bridge in Fallujah, the naked abused prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and now this decapitation video, that force us to question the price we’re willing to pay to accomplish… accomplish…

Accomplish what? We went to war to defend ourselves against WMD’s that weren’t there, aren’t there, and are likely to never be found (unless we plant some in time for the election). We went to war to liberate Iraq from Saddam, well, mission accomplished. So now why are we there? To protect American War Profiteers and their assets? To force democracy on a people who aren’t ready for it (as long as they choose the leaders and government we approve of)?

Bush calls this a war on terror. Looks like we’re manufacturing more terror to me. All the video and photos I see lately feature people in terror. It’s left me a bit terrified.

Now somewhere I can hear Rush Pillpopper and Sean Insannity braying about how our abuse of prisoners was more like a frat hazing, and my God look at what they’ve done to our boys! As if there’s brownie points for abusing your opponent less than the other guy. We’re America, fellas. We’re supposed to the beacon of morality in the world. When we defeated Germany in WWII, did we send their war criminals to gas chambers and concentration camps, as they probably deserved? No! We afforded them human rights and open justice, and this made us saviors in the eyes of the world.

So anyway, I saw the video for myself. I felt it important. Like the photo of the naked burned Vietnamese girl or the execution-style shooting of the Vietnamese man from our last attempt at nation-building and population-liberating in a country on the far side of the world that never attacked us, whom we went to war with on a foundation of lies. A picture is worth a thousand words.

I don’t necessarily encourage anyone else to go see this, but I provide the link in case you do. I am pretty hardened to guts and gore, and it made me a little ill. The one thing I will say is that if you are imagining a Marie Antoinette-style quick-chop-of-an-axe beheading like from the movies, you’re way off base. There’s five masked militants standing behind a seated and bound Nick Berg. He states his name. They rattle off a whole bunch of Arabic. Then they spin him around so he’s facing the ground, grab him by the hair, and begin sawing through his neck with a 12-inch knife. The process takes about two minutes. During the first thirty seconds of it, you can hear Berg screaming, but by the time they get through his windpipe, he’s silent. At the end, the knife-wielding militant holds up the decapitated head.

This is not going to get any better, folks. Start thinking about how we’re going to get out of Iraq, or at least tell me what we’re trying to accomplish.

See, the problem is this “war” thinking. War is when one country’s army fights another country’s army. It was a great way of doing business and solving problems up until around 1960. Then we started applying this war idea against concepts rather than armies. Like the “War on Drugs” or the “War on Communism” or the “War on Terror”. You can’t have a War on Drugs — but you can have a war against civilians who have drugs. Likewise, this War on Terror — just who is it that you’re fighting against?

Now, if it were a War on Terrorists — that I can get behind. That’s why I was all for getting into Afghanistan; that’s where the terrorists, specifically Osama bin Laden, who brought us 9/11 were located.

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