Dehumanizing others is no virtue

That is so true, Father, but it is as much as part of war as bullets and guns are.

That is why war should never be entered into lightly, much less because of lies and twisted Intel.

Are Americans responsible for the continuing carnage in Iraq? Generally, yes, I believe. The exceptions would be those who have spoken out against this criminal war and voted against Bush in 2004.

By November, 2004 Americans should have known that they were lied to about the excuses to prosecute a war in Iraq. By 2004 Americans also knew about torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Wars of aggression and torture are war crimes of the highest maginitude.

Ignorance is no excuse. There was plenty of evidence in the public domain; irrefutable evdence of high crimes an misdemeanors.

There is no way that Americans who followed Bush over this cliff are anything but guilty. The U.S. is still billed as a Democracy, and as such, it's citizens are responsible for staying informed and taking right action against their own government when it commits crimes. When it comes to this administration the list of crimes is too long for one post.

Dehumanizing others is no virtue:

To hate other humans or to feel no pain at their suffering, it is necessary to dehumanize them, to write them off as less than human. The Nazis are the classic example of this dehumanization. Germans were the obermensch, the master race. Jews, Slavs, Gypsies were the untermensch, the inferior peoples who barely had the right to exist.

The Puritans dehumanized Native Americans, white Americans dehumanized African Americans, Irish Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland dehumanized one another, as do Jews and Arabs in the Mideast, and Shiite and Sunni Muslims. In every case, one attributes to the 'other' characteristics that prove that they are not fully human by the use of stereotypes -- 'illegals,' for example. The American soldiers who tortured, beat, raped and murdered Iraqis dismiss their victims as 'rag heads.' The rest of us are able to ignore the pain and the grief of ordinary Iraqis, as I learned from responses to my last column, by arguing that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attack or that Saddam Hussein killed far more than have died under our inept and unplanned 'occupation.'