It is late, and I wasn’t going to post anything tonight, but this moment cannot pass without acknowledging and grieving the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg, the 26 year-old Westchester PA entrepreneur in Iraq to work on communication towers who was beheaded in front of a video camera, as I am sure you know. Several things need saying — first and foremost, my prayers are with Berg’s mourning family, friends and community. Ironically, he was reportedly detained arbitrarily for days by the US after turned over by Iraqi authorities, supposedly for being out late at night. His parents blame his death indirectly on this detention, which prolonged his stay in Iraq until the Iraqi Intifada had exploded and it was no longer safe for him even to get to the Baghdad airport to leave. In the face of the arbitrary heinousness of his executioners, I have a hard time with his parents’ reasoning in blaming the US, although in a different way I do hold the administration accountable — for the exploitation of the naive strike-it-rich dreams of a young American entrepreneur which are the sorry excuse for fulfilling our ‘nation-building’ responsibility in the face of the baldfaced lies that the country has been ‘liberated’ and ‘pacified’. No one should be surprised something like this has happened; indeed, we should be surprised it is not happening more often. Be surprised that any civilians not involved in black ops or humanitarian relief, particularly someone who is Jewish as both Berg and Danny Pearl were, could be lulled into operating in the anarchic morass into which we have turned Iraq. Bush’s idiotic message of attempted consolation to the family today was that Berg died contributing to building a “free Iraq”.

It is clear that Iraq today is comprised of a small minority with an endless capacity for lethal brutality and a large majority who will passively ignore or passively celebrate the death of an American… and virtually none who support the US dreams of a democratic client state except the pitiful opportunistic exiles with no constituency to govern Iraq except the neo-cons in Washington. Now, after the US has engendered anarchic lawlessness, we will “bring the murderers to justice?” After rebuffing years’ worth of impassioned pleas from all over the world to address bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s lawlessness by lawful judicial means, we use the meaningless legalistic rhetoric only when it suits us. Berg’s slayers are about as likely to be brought to justice as Pearl’s.

Inevitably, Berg’s murder is invoked in the same breath as Abu Ghraib, in any of several senses. Some say that the revelations of the prison torture have prompted a revenge killing. It seems to me that, although his kilers said that it was provoked by Abu Ghraib, this was only a pretext. As I have said over and over, the prison tortures are emblematic of the racist, xenophobic, megalomanic attitude that informs the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as a whole. On the other hand, it does not serve to draw shrill, facile equations between the level of brutality shown by the prison guards at Abu Ghraib and that of al Zarqawi’s men in carrying out Berg’s murder. Nevertheless, let us not let the administration use the convenient timing of Berg’s murder for its own propaganda ends, to distract its American audience from the US atrocities. And let us not buy into the automatic labelling of this as ‘al Qaeda-related’, as we do every instance of franchised fundamentalist terrorism since 9-11. We now use ‘al Qaeda threat’ as generically as, for those of you old enough to remember, we used ‘Communist threat’ during the Cold War, and equally meaninglessly. Al Qaeda is our enemy; any enemy is al Qaeda. The administration claims of al Qaeda connections in Iraq were as specious as the WMD claims, and it was in particular al Zarqawi himself, as Atrios reminds us, who was used as one of the justifications for the invasion. “The Bush administration ignored 3 opportunities to get him, feeling that it would undercut their non-existent case for war in Iraq.” Since I am convinced there is little more to al Qaeda than a ragtag assortment of indigenous fundamentalist, rageful movements who admire the same icons and find it convenient for any of a number of reasons to loosely affiliate under one banner, the determination the Berg murder may provoke to exterminate the movement is likely to be futile. It is a new world and the buckaroos in the White House just haven’t got a clue; the ‘war’ is lost. [And, by the way, can you imagine how much hay the asinine Sen. Inhofe will make of this?]