The Moderate Republican

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The prisoner "abuse" - which looks like it includes rape and at least one death - which looks like it affects innocent Iraqis mistakely imprisoned - is the result of dehumanizing the Iraqis (and Arabs and Muslims in general).

The dehumanization occurs because some people think, at some subliminal level, that all Arabs or all Muslims are alike. Arabs/Muslims attacked us on 9/11 -- Iraqis are Arabs/Muslims -- Iraqis attacked us.

We're smart enough of course not to say that out loud, so we pick an obviously bad Arab like Saddam, pin the blame on him and take him out to send a message to all those other Arabs/Muslims that we're not afraid to violate International Law to defend ourselves from "them".

A more sophisticated version of the same fallacy is The Project for a New American Century's grandiose vision to "transform" all those Arabs/Muslims by gifting them with democracy. Anyone in jail must be preventing us from that goal and must be sympathic to the 9/11 attackers and thus are one of "them".

The prisoner abuse is a physical representation of the poison that started the war. Some people will turn their face from the truth (and seek to place the blame elsewhere) - but I think that a greater percentage of people have been freed from the lies that bound them.

Our fearless leader has lost whatever shred of credibility he had left and his lofty rhetoric sounds like fingernails scraped across a blackboard.

We have now started an unnecessary war in violation of international law, abused (and probably raped and killed) prisoners in our care ---

and our last defense before ourselves before the people of the world and before God, is that at least we don't behead people.

Thanks for the shout out, Dennis!

All I can say is...

If this were 1954, guys like Robert Knight would be blaming blacks rather than gays. He'd claim that allowing blacks into the military was responsible for the moral decline of the military, that society's acceptance of blacks into the mainstream and desgregation were causing America's cultural decline, etc.