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Ever since Nick Berg lost his head, I've been saying the following: unless we WIPE OUT these barbarians who mean to topple us, they will succeed. Ask the Romans. If I had to bet on barbarians or civilized people, I'd bet on barbarians any day.

Good article!

Likewise, half a dozen bloody abuses committed by American soldiers in Iraq − which are inevitable in any war, even under a strict oversight of the troops – appear in the media as more heinous cruelties than the routine practice of torture and the political assassination in time of peace, common in communist and Islamic countries, not to mention the religious persecution (which is never reported in Brazil), that has already killed over two million Christians in the past few decades.

Another point I would like to raise, that I've yet to see much addressed; we've had a hundred thousand troops in Iraq for a year, and the media, doing its damnest has only been able to find a handful of legitimate crimes by our troops.

However, if you look at the statistics, one can expect far worse not just among our enemies and the leadership of the UN Human Rights Committee - but even among American civilians at peace.

If one looks at domestic crimes statistics per 100K Americans (as of 2002) we find 6 murders, 33 rapes, 310 aggravated assaults, and overall 4,119 serious felonies.

So, while the media portrays Abu Ghirab as the worst crime against humanity since the Holocaust (in some cases literaly), the fact of the matter is that the good conduct of American soldiers is a testiment to their basic goodness.

the asymmetry must impregnate itself deeply in the judgment habits of people, so that public opinion does not detect the intrinsic immorality of the supposedly moral demands that it exacts from one of the disputing parties, while granting to the other the benefit of an indifferent or complicit silence.

A truly excellent and perceptive article. The description of the behavior of French intellectuals regarding the Algerian conflict (which I think was the source of the behavior of American intellectuals regarding Vietnam) was particularly accurate.

This article is a good antidote to a recent Leonard Pitts column, where Leonard played the 'useful idiot' and advocated the need for a double-standard ""how dae we hold ourselves to the same moral standard as terrorists, we have to be better than that!"

Ahem. No.

we must hold to the SAME moral standard, for all people in all cases. We should NEVER give our enemy any benefit of the doubt. THEY WANT US DEAD. Why do we shirk our duty to kill them, a duty we have for the sake of our civilization and our children?