Sunday, March 12, 2006

Reprehensible, Lamentable

Baghdad, Iraq, March 11 — Tom Fox, the kidnapped American peace worker whose body was found this week, had apparently been tortured by his captors before being shot multiple times in the head and dumped on a trash heap next to a railway line in western Baghdad, an official at the Iraqi Interior Ministry said Saturday.

This lead from today's Sunday New York Times says a lot. In a sense, it epitomizes the situation in Iraq: merciless, animalistic and bloody. No matter what your politics, one must admit that this war is consuming far too many lives. And I'm sick of it. I'm sick of reading the newspaper every day and seeing the names of the dead. I'm sick of the apathy many Americans – especially those in my age group – express toward the war. I'm sick of blaming the president or vice president for all these woes. I'm sick of not being able to do anything about being sick.

But, then again, it's really not about me. It's about Tom Fox's daughter, who, for the rest of her life, will have to live with nightmares of terrorists torturing, then killing, her father.

It's about an Iraqi family, whose lives have been ripped apart by the death of two sons and a father – two sons and a father who still would be alive today, had American forces not accidentally gunned them down at a checkpoint in Iraq a few years ago.

It's about all the American families who have lost sons or daughters at the cruel hand of this war.

How can one justify these deaths or these shattered lives?

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