Screaming bloody murder

On Tuesday, in one of the most shocking images ever seen on television, we were confronted by a man, his hands covered in blood and still grasping the implements of decapitation, explaining that his dreadful act was payback for the thousands of innocent Muslims exterminated by western armies pursuing their own agenda of hegemony.

Often following acts of terrorist outrages, words like "cowardly acts" are invoked. Yet when the details of the 9/11 attacks emerged it became clear that whatever else these terrible acts of mass murder were, one thing they were not was cowardly. The 19 hijackers in fact demonstrated extraordinary levels of courage in carrying out their awful deeds.
And likewise, while the whole nation may come together in condemnation of a disgraceful act of murder, the nation must also acknowledge that our state, and to an even greater extent the American state, has blood on its hands too. Perhaps as many as half a million Iraqi civilians died in the two Iraq wars, and untold thousands more in Afghanistan, through "friendly fire" incidents, faulty intelligence, poorly programmed drone attacks and sheer blunt stupidity. Casualties of war? If so, then our plucky drummer-boy is no less a casualty of war than they are.

It's a dirty, stinking world out there, and the fact is that we are partly responsible for making it that way