It should be noted that the leader of the group responsible for the Johnson beheading was himself killed not long after committing the crime. Further perpetuating "an eye for an eye" kind of justice.

With this in mind it is important to consider Bush's words, "And it should remind us that we must pursue these people, and bring them to justice before they hurt other Americans."

This requires asking an important question: at what point in the process prior to actually committing a crime should "these people" be brought to justice?
- Aaron Yassin (guest) 6-20-2004 8:08 am

Thanks for commenting, Aaron. Speaking of the cycle of revenge, Bill O'Reilly has been spewing some out-and-out racist stuff on his radio show. David Brock's site Media Matters has been taking notes:

From the June 17 broadcast of The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Because look ... when 2 percent of the population feels that you're doing them a favor, just forget it, you're not going to win. You're not going to win. And I don't have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they're a prehistoric group that is -- yeah, there's excuses.

Sure, they're terrorized, they've never known freedom, all of that. There's excuses. I understand. But I don't have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it's time to -- time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain't going to work.

[...]

They're just people who are primitive.

Also, it appears O'Reilly got the first installment of his wish in Fallujah this week. Juan Cole has the following commentary:

The US dropped two bombs on a poor residential district of Fallujah on Saturday, killing at least 22 and wounding 9. The F-16 destroyed two houses and damaged 6 others. Most of those dead, including 3 women and 5 children, belonged to the extended family of a local farmer, Muhammad Hamadi. The US maintained that the building hit was a safe house for the al-Tawhid terrorist group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Local Iraqis in Fallujah maintained that most of those killed were innocent civilians.

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but for an Occupying Power to drop bombs on residential neighborhoods is a war crime. The three women and five children killed are not "collateral damage." They are human beings. They were killed by the United States. There are no such things as "precision strikes" in residential neighborhoods. Bombs not only throw off shrapnel themselves, they create lots of deadly flying debris, including flying glass from broken windows, that can kill and maim. Dropping bombs on an tank corps assembled in the desert and intending to do harm is one thing. Dropping bombs on a residential district is another.

We on the outside have no way of judging the various claims made in these sorts of situations. For all I know the Hamadi clan has a lot of blood on its hands and has been blowing up people. But if so, they should have been arrested by a special ops team cooperating with the Fallujah Brigade. You can't go around bombing residential buildings and killing women and children if you are to retain any respect whatsoever from the local population or, indeed, the world community. Remember that when Bush puts pressure on India or Pakistan to send troops to help in Iraq, one of the implications is that he is asking their military officers to be an active party to things like bombing residential complexes. They have publics that are already angry about the US occupation of Iraq and how it has been (mis)managed. They need to be associated with this kind of action like they need a hole in the head. That's the pragmatic argument. The legal argument against carrying out this kind of strike is that the pilots who [did it could] conceivably be charged in some tribunal somewhere in the world, as, indeed, could everyone above them who approved the order to strike.

There were manifestations of public anger over all this in Fallujah, and presumably in the rest of the Sunni heartland. It doesn't do any good to kill 15 guerrillas and their wives and children (if they were in fact guerrillas) if in so doing you create 30 more.