The Age Of Irresponsibility

Re-posted from a Yahoo group:


I'm not happy that there exists a "conservative" lead paramilitary
that is outside both United States and Iraqi laws, and that we the
taxpayers paying the tab.

This "kill for free ethos" is not a by-the book anti-insurgency
tactic, I think, but only encourages an ever more dangerous state of
anomie. Anomie encourages further insurgency and lawlessness, as
people fill meaning into their lives by killing the "other." The
"other" includes occupying forces, of course, as well as others seen
to be age-old enemies and the usual designated scapegoats such as gay
people and other minorities in some way, such as the non-majority
religious. The scapegoats are charged with being moral polluters and
religious contaminators responsible for bringing God's wrath down upon
all.

In theory anyway, American military are not in the "kill for free"
group like Blackwater, though if military leaders tacitly allow it,
who's there to bring justice?

The Age of Irresponsibility
How Bush has created a moral vacuum in Iraq in which Americans can
kill for free.

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 1:12 p.m. MT Sept 20, 2007

Sept. 20, 2007 - Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and
children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to
justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary
killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in
nightmarish dystopian fiction, like "1984," or in fevered passages
from Dostoevsky?or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist
purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is
called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush...more
on link

Hirsh: Blackwater and the Bush Legacy - Newsweek Michael Hirsh - MSNBC.com