Here's a Pretty Interesting Take on Things

Does a deeply divided U.S. have the guts needed to win in Iraq?

Excerpts:

Here's my soapbox, and I'm on it.

First off, let me say I was against us going into Iraq. No, I wasn't concerned about the lack of a blessing from the United Nations, which couldn't hit a bull in the rump with a banjo.

Nor did I care about evidence proving the presence of WMDs. Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction, a weapon designed by international meddlers such as ourselves.

My fear was, and is, that this country doesn't have the guts and historical awareness to prevail in a region where numerous civilizations, some of them utterly ruthless, have lost their shirts.

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And any idiot could've predicted the way we'd react when the real body count mounted, as it did in earnest two months ago. News agencies tripped over themselves to present the photos of our war dead, while greater numbers of people were being murdered on the streets of our own fine nation.

And look how we barfed over the images of the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, while we seem perfectly at peace with the common phenomenon of prisoners raping each other in our own country.

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Former Abu Ghraib prisoner Dhia al-Shweiri said he preferred the electric shocks and beatings he suffered in the prison when it was under Saddam's control to the humiliation he suffered when the American guards made him strip (once) - and lean against a wall (for 15 minutes).

"They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. . . . They wanted us to feel as though we are women, the way women feel." (So that's the way they treat women?)

There it is. It's better to be shocked, beaten and shot between the eyes than to feel like a woman.

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We're in the midst of a titanic cultural and religious war with a borderless enemy, and we're unarmed on both counts.

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