How many of us will soon forget what happened yesterday in Spain? Yet how many of us still remember what happened ten days ago in Iraq?
Because the Iraqis remain strangers to us, it’s easier to overlook their loss, or to see it as part of a long pattern of violence to which they must have become accustomed by now. Or as William Westmoreland put it, “Orientals don’t mourn their dead like Americans.”
But I don’t believe that.
The suffering of each death and each wound is real. The pain and loss of the families is real. That Iraq has seen so much carnage is only evidence of how great their suffering has been and continues to be.
*
The UK Guardian has a useful, if depressing, roundup of recent major terror attacks. Some of them took place before we captured Saddam, some of them afterward.
Do you feel safer now?