Collateral Damage.

Today, as President Bush once again attempted to deceive Americans with polyanna statements as to "progress" (buzz word of the day) in Iraq, twelve Marines are under investigation for possible war crimes. Here's the link. It reads like a bad movie plot. A roadside bomb goes off and Marines start shooting. They round up civilians in a house and keep shooting. When the shooting, exclusively Marine shooting, ends, there are fifteen Iraqi civilians dead, including a three-year-old girl. They shot civilians in two houses, in the streets, without regard to sex or age. They threw a grenade into a boy's room.

The military calls it collateral damage. The event was first shown to the military in January. The attack happened November 19th. We are just now learning about it via a tape given to Time magazine by a journalism student. The tape shows the dead still in their nightclothes.

The worst collateral damage of the Iraq war is that it is completely believable that the Marines carried out executions in revenge for the roadside bomb attack that killed one of theirs. Thanks to the Republicans' unjustified war, the following atrocities are now believable:

- Secret torture chambers in foreign countries away from the scrutiny of the Press or Congress.

- Overt torture chambers on foreign soil where the Government claims American law and values do not apply.

- Indefinite detention of American citizens without trial, without accusation, without the right to a lawyer and without hope of release.

- A domestic spying program to rival the best of the KGB. Search engine subpoenas are next.

- A campaign to discredit the judiciary that the greatest totalitarian regimes of the last century would be proud of.

- Preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us, had no weapons of mass destructions or ties to terrorists, then a three-year campaign of prevarication to justify just one more time why we did it.

- Ethical scandals the Roman republic would have been proud of.

And the list goes on. In short, we have earned the disgust and distrust with which our one-time allies view us and the disdain the new democracies in Latin America have for us. We are no longer the shining light of liberty, rather another roadmap to totalitarianism. Security now means more to us than liberty, appearance means more than substance, Homeland Security trumps freedom of the press, religious dogma trumps scientific fact. At the Air Force Academy, religious indoctrination comes alongside leadership and military tactics and why not? It's much easier to get someone to die if you convince them that they're going to receive an immediate reward in the hereafter and that they're carrying out God's plan. Besides, in a military setting, if the Colonel says let's pray, the cadet bows.

It's a great way to convince yourself you're Right. You make yourself an element of prophesy, a part of God's plan for the world then anything you do, regardless of whether God's son would approve, becomes Right. You can now kill heathen moslems because it's part of God's Plan that you smite the infidel. Preemptive war is now permissible because the United States is God's country, the land of the Christian Soldier - hear the choir warming up in the background?

Then you not only believe your own sermons, you believe your own press. Then you massacre Moslems in the name of God and Country, just because they happen to live near the site of a roadside bomb.