As I was stupidly killing time in the computer lab this afternoon, I happened to come accross this blog: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

It’s written by an English speaking girl in occupied Iraq, and provides a small portion of “the other side of the story” that America is so sorely lacking. Reading her thoughts and experiences raises some uncomfortable questions. “Did I do this? Did my government do this? Did I support my government in doing this? Did I even stop to think about the Iraqi invasion while it took place, about the hundreds and thousands of lives? Did I do anything to oppose the war? …”

Riverbend writes:

While we were aware the whole WMD farce was just a badly produced black comedy, it’s still upsetting to hear Bush’s declaration that he was wrong. It’s upsetting because it just confirms the worst: right-wing Americans don’t care about justifying this war. They don’t care about right or wrong or innocents dead and more to die. They were somewhat ahead of the game. When they saw their idiotic president wasn’t going to find weapons anywhere in Iraq, they decided it would be about mass graves. It wasn’t long before the very people who came to ‘liberate’ a sovereign country soon began burying more Iraqis in mass graves. The smart weapons began to stupidly kill ‘possibly innocent’ civilians (they are only ‘definitely innocent’ if they are working with the current Iraqi security forces or American troops). It went once more from protecting poor Iraqis from themselves to protecting Americans from ‘terrorists’.

Samuel P. Huntington writes

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.