Waking up from sleep....

Yesterday I was late for work and A was driving me....we had NPR on the radio and they were playing a speech Bush was making in response to something that had happened earlier that morning in London. I turned to A and was like,

"Well, what happened in London?"

I turned the knob on the volume up and listened for details, but as it was NPR there was heavy skirting around the event and much talking to experts. It wasnt until I was preparing to make my leap out of the truck and onto the train that they finally revealed that there had been bombings....or terriost attacks to be more exact....that morning on the Tube and a double-decker bus. London had been hit.

At work I surfed the net trying to find out more about what had occured. I started first at news.google.com, an excellent source of MSM from around the country and world. After getting the facts as they stood I headed over to the blogs, looking for perspectives. I encountered anger, disgust, a "they only got what they deserved" and even--sadly--joy, but that was from specific sources.

To all those who would say the British only got what they deserved for their actions in Iraq:
First, there must needs be a clarification of the differences between civilian deaths in war and civilian deaths in terriost attacks. Contrary to popular belief, the US and British did not go over to Iraq with the direct purpose to "kill ordinary Iraqis". The intention was, as it normally is during war, to fight an army -- a regularized, recognized, uniformed army. And they did. Civilian deaths, when they occur, do so because said people may have been in the way of armies fighting, or caught up in it through sheer chance. Civilians are not targeted intentionally (but that doesnt mean there arent example of it happening....I merely stating how modern armies attempt to fight war).

Terriost attacks, on the other hand, intentionally target civilians, with the express purpose of killing as many as possible. There is no declared intention of fighting with a uniformed army. Civilian deaths are for the terriosts optimal, not regretable. There is an effort to inflict fear and disrupt normal, everyday life.

Secondly, the British are not over there "killing Iraqis". As it currently stands in Iraq, Saudis, North Africans, Syrians and Iranians are killing Iraqis with car bombs and suicide attacks. The British do not deserve to be attacked for this reason. The attacks in London, as they are in Iraq, are murder, pure and simple.

Eve