Beheadings and panties on the head

Uber-right wing apologists have taken to pointing at the beheadings of Al Qaeda-captured prisoners, and saying that the equivalent act is the prisoner who had to wear panties on his head.

This is disingenuous to say the least. They've taken the most offensive behaviours of the terrorists, matched them up against the least offensive behaviours of the Abu Ghraib dominatrixes, and then used the obvious gap that there would be between these disparate ranges of behaviour to imply that Arabs are bad and Americans are good. (They don't come out and say that, but given that the most recent beheading was two countries away from Iraq, I don't know what other conclusion I can draw.)

But these are not the appropriate comparisons. If Abu Ghraib is what these right wingers think bears comparison, then lets look at Abu Grhaib's real savagery: several of the Abu Ghraib photos show guards hamming it up beside the cadaver of a badly beaten man who is being kept on ice. Now that - that is the comparable act. Not any business about panties on the head.

And then how can you help but look at the disproportionateness of American responses to killings in Iraq? Their most recent response to Al Zarqawi, the beheader of Nick Berg, was to blow up houses full of people in Fallujah - including several women and children (how many heads did they lose?)

You see, the problem with war is that it is all savagery. We can dress it up in uniforms and talk about Geneva conventions, but war is a visceral and emotional response to problems that generally results in people being unfairly deprived of their lives.

This is one of the reasons for the Just War doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas - when a nation goes to war needs to be strictly limited to situations that are either purely defensive, or where a legitimate and competent authority is able to bring about, as a last step when all peaceful means have been exhausted, a good in response to an imminent threat that is on balance greater than the harm that would be otherwise brought.

War must not be a tool of foreign policy. It can and must only be used as an emergency response to a grave and vital threat. War is always a defeat - because it means that we were not able to solve our problems in mature and reasonable fashion.

That is not to say that all wars that have ever been fought are unjustifiable. Most people would agree that the Western countries were right to defend their nations against the Third Reich of Germany, and right to force the Axis into unconditional surrender.

But even a Just War is still a defeat. And it is a defeat be it by blowback from events set in motion decades earlier, or by a madman who built up arms that could be used to take much of the world (and no, Saddam is no Hitler as the dearth of any evidence shows.)

It is time to turn away from violence as a solution to problems, and truly embrace not just talking or hearing, but dialoguing and listening as the way to collaborate on cutting out the terrorists, once and for all.