Eye for an eye

By now pretty much everyone knows I'm sure about the horrible murder of a Nick Berg, a random civilian contractor who apparently wasn't even on government payroll. Of course, conservatives are screaming that this murder justifies the way that our military has been torturing Iraqis, many of whom are also innocent civilians. (Link through Pandagon.) The fact that the torture is being used as a reason behind this murder is an irony that seems to be completely lost in noise.
I have said, and many other people have said, that Limbaugh is leading the pack, and expect to hear that this torture is acceptable and even desirable. And sure enough, the argument that this torture is a good thing got trotted out by a Senator today. Tomorrow Limbaugh is likely to blame the people who are getting tortured for this poor young man's murder.
Senator Inhofe is holding all Iraqis guilty for what a few did. The mere fact of their citizenship makes them suspect and any torture of them unfortunate but necessary in his view. The terrorists who killed Nick Berg show a similiar disregard for niceties like the differences between the few Americans who have made them angry and the rest of us. Someone is going to have to suck it up and make room in his/her thought process for a little complexity, to manage not to hold an entire race/religion/nationality/institution responsible for the actions of the few. That or the cycle of revenge and violence will have no end in sight.
And I'm going to go out on a limb now and say that we cannot expect Al Qaeda to take the first steps towards peace. They are a bunch of religious fundamentalists; being unreasonable and seeing the world in black and white is pretty much their M.O. We can't really rely on the Republicans in power to grow a brain and realize that escalating violence only results in escalated violence; they too are indebted to religious fanatics who cannot grasp the shades of gray and that different shades of people aren't necessarily evil.