My government’s violent occupation of Iraq has not flustered me nearly as much as the nonchalance of half of America.  Why are so many Americans utterly complacent about the wretched and rampant killing going on in our names?  Is it possible that we have become confused and seduced by the magnitude of the killings and by the music?  Allow me to explain.

First, the magnitude.  Stalin’s well-cited quote comes to mind: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”  Perhaps the immoral nature of Bush’s aggression would be clearer had Bush caused the death of only one man.  Imagine this hypothetical: 

President Bush looks out the window of the oval office and sees a man wearing a backpack walking down the sidewalk.  In a dry-drunkish paranoid moment, Bush tells his security officers that the man walking down the sidewalk has nuclear weapons grade aluminum tubes in his backpack and orders his guards to capture “that terrorist.”  While capturing the man with the backpack (it turns out to be empty), a U.S soldier is accidentally shot by friendly fire of a fellow soldier.

It is later disclosed that, one minute before giving his order to capture the man, a former ambassador had advised Bush the man wearing the backpack had just been searched and that he was not carrying anything dangerous.  Then it came out that Bush and his highest advisers had intentionally blown the cover of a CIA agent to discredit the former