This story makes my heart hurt. It should be shoved in the face of every self-righteous bleep who prides himself on opposing war. But what good would it do? They don't oppose war because of any real principle, but because it's considered "progressive" in the circles they run with.
I wonder if there will be an Iraqi reconciliation committee like the ones in South Africa. I'm reading A History of the Arab People by Albert Hourani, feeling every minute how foolish it is to try to learn much about such a subject in a single volume. As I read about the intellectual developments and culture developed in places like Iraq a thousand years ago, I struggle to understand how these people could have come to be subjected to a regime that made the Nazis look like rank amateurs. I suppose that this is nothing new. Russia, China, Cambodia all descended from hign cultures to genocide and oceans of blood. For all the belittling of religion, even apostate religions haven't wallowed in gore to the extent of modern mechanized murder. Wars are grim, to be sure, but there are often good reasons for them. When they are justified, it is better to go sooner, with overwhelming power and to destroy the source of the infection, than to dither and moralize while the latest version of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Saddam compounds the slaughter.