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[ Presenting plain-text part of multi-format email ] And the extermination campaign of native americans, as well as the KKK style attacks on African-Americans were done by people claiming to be good American citizens and true patriots. Currently, the 'good patriots' supporting this invasion of Iraq are talking about the moral goal of liberating Iraqi civilians from Saddam - and they are willing to spend billions of dollars and unknown numbers of US/UK lives to effect that invasion. Yet few of these people would have supported sending anything close to that amount in humanitarian aid in the form of money and supplies, building up water, sewage, energy systems to provide for those very same Iraqi people without a war - and few are seriously expecting to do it after a war. Certainly Iraq's strategic location, muslim population and oil reserves were a greater motivation for the worth of the war, than saving Iraqi people from a brutal dictator. Now some Americans are outraged that dead US soldiers were shown on Iraqi television and in the Arab media. Just as some Americans discount 'mass death' in other countries as not worth US energy to stop or prevent, they cannot see 9/11 as an experience to make them abhor mass violence in Iraq because they don't believe that the lives of Iraqi people is as valuable as that of Americans. Not even the deaths of women, children, the elderly, male civilians, are considered valuable - if such innocents die then that is the 'price' of war and it is horrible, but so what? If one dares to mention that just as some Americans consider that cheering of planes crashing on 9/11 as an evil act, perhaps Americans cheering a 'shock and awe' campaign are just as evil. How could Bush have convinced so many citizens that bombing Iraq was just? How can so many people have been so easily able to dismiss the Iraqi loss of life as 'necessary' to liberate them? I think it is because most of those same people convinced were raised in a social structure that never valued those Iraqi lives at all. "Certain" lives are always expendable, and certain lives are always 'collateral damage' because they were never really anything but that for some people. And they never will be, neither in war or in occupation. N _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk