I was ashamed of myself today. I had heard about the American who was beheaded in Iraq, but I had thought of it in an abstract way. In other words, I thought it was terrible, but in some sense it didn't hit me as real. Well, today USA Today ran a picture on the front page of Nick Berg sitting before his captors just before he was killed. The fact that he was then beheaded was bad enough, but then I found out that they didn't execute him with a sword, but held him down and sawed his head off while he screamed.

Then came the part that I'm ashamed of. My reaction to this was to think that maybe an appropriate response to this atrocity would be carpet bombing. I literally thought of the phrase "build a wall with the bodies of the dead." I had to force myself to admit that this murder was not commited by average Iraqis, or necessarily by Iraqis at all. This despite memories of average Iraqis dismembering and burning the bodies of those contractors a while back, leaving their bodies hanging from a bridge.

I'm still working on this one.