The War in Iraq, The Worst Side of Each Side

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In times of war, it is inevitable that we’ll receive images of mindless brutality and unsettling death. From out the ongoing War in Iraq horrible images have emerged that condemn both sides as being guilty of the same crime. The camera lens has caught both sides performing the same act: the cold-blooded execution of the helpless and innocent. Both sides have left us all with a painfully lingering question, a question concerning the respect for life that should ideally go hand-in-hand with action, and our purpose behind it.Margaret Hassan was a humanitarian worker who had lived in Iraq for 30 years trying to uplift her people out of the numerous humanitarian disasters that have plagued the country for decades. On October 19 she was kidnapped by armed men, who then began to leak videos of Hassan pleading for her life, asking Tony Blair to withdraw British Forces. The latest video leaked shows Hassan being executed by her unknown captors, making this new face of death another fear inspiring tool in the ugly guerilla war.In Fallujah, in our latest effort to crush the city into passivity, we’ve received yet another disheartening image of death that will circulate the globe. An NBC cameraman caught a United States Marine shooting dead an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner. As the invaders and as those promising change for the better, this picture of cold-blooded cruelty will make it that much more difficult in our effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Not only was this a violation of the Geneva Convention, it was one upon many images of an already morally questionable occupation. So where do we go from here? On each side of the conflict we have poignant pictures of the indiscriminant slaughter of both benevolent and helpless life. Americans and the rest of the world see an insurgency ruled by a terrorist mindset that would kill even the most honorable and compassionate of individuals for the simple purpose of inspiring fear. Iraqis and the rest of the world see a monstrous occupation rife with negligent murderers who don’t value the life they are supposedly taking care of. Americans, Iraqis, and the rest of the world cannot afford to take these latest images as representative of the whole. We cannot allow heartless religious fundamentalists to represent the dominantly peaceful and ethnically diverse religion of Islam or the Iraqi people’s struggle for human rights and self-governance. We cannot allow the deplorable actions of a US Marine in Fallujah to jade the efforts of our Armed Services in rebuilding the nation of Iraq with honor and consideration for the life around them.The majority in Iraq are religious moderates who want a society that Islamic Fundamentalism would deny. They desire a society free from political persecution where dissent is possible and government meets the needs of the people. The vast majority of United States Military personnel believe in their mission in Iraq and sincerely care about lifting the Iraqi people out of this quagmire and into a period of stability and prosperity. These two latest images are of the worst side of each side, and need to be recognized as such. In war, injustice is inevitable, and a few bad seeds can be seen as reality distilled. Let us remember the human element within the struggle, that inherent quality which loves and empathizes with the downtrodden, no matter what God they pray to or what flag they salute.