There are murderous consequences to the righteous imposition of an ideology on another country or people.

Explaining to the Iraqi mother that American soldiers slaughtered her 6-year-old son in order to allow the woman to vote in an election seems not to move her the way it moves Americans.

She could not know the heaven waiting for her in free trade and human rights.

She does not understand the analysis that demonstrates her loss is to her benefit. She does not revel in abstractions.

The woman holds her son's rib cage and tattered pant leg in her lap.

Where did America develop this calculus of destruction? When did we decide that political power required uncountable innocent deaths and incalculable destruction?

Perhaps it began years ago when Walter Cronkite, 20 minutes into the CBS Nightly News, told us in 15 seconds of scripted narrative, “Today, the American Air Force dropped 17,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi. According to on-the-scene reports, thousands of North Vietnamese were killed.”

Then he told us about the latest miracle cure or elephant adventure.

Buried in vacuous nonsense, these two lines told a story of unimaginable slaughter like it was just another event in our American day. Ho-hum.

Are the people of this country so ready to excuse profoundly immoral behavior that we accept the flimsiest of rationales? In the name of democracy, our armies destroy a country and its people.

We kill them and then they vote. Those lines worming their way to voting locations in Iraq were clogged with ghosts. Most of them were laughing at the madness of it. Our soldiers control most of the country.

Do we believe for one minute that the vote was democratic? We imposed our will on Iraq. We told them to vote. We will not accept for one second a government that is not to our liking.

Imagine for a minute, the Crusaders capturing Jerusalem in the name of Christ. They were Christian warriors like American soldiers are democratic warriors.

Can you see lines of knights and Christian soldiers herding the citizens of Jerusalem to Christian services? Hyperbolic? Overdrawn? Maybe. But since when does man impose salvation at the point of a gun?

I would like to blame the limited man in the White House for this disaster, but he's only a symptom of our despair. We have voted for cowardly, corrupt local, state and national political figures over and over again - people so devoted to self-promotion that they have lost all moral equilibrium. It is us, the enemy we have seen.

Hurley writes from

Skaneateles