I was pointing out a small item of good feelings in a bad environment. Like the soccer game. Sorry you weren't amused. The Iraqis were.

We are winning. It isn't easy or painless, but we are winning.

And your point with yet another charnelhouse on display is what? War is hell?

This is news?

There has been no war ever fought on the face of the Earth that has not held similar scenes. None. Most of them far, far worse than this.

Civilians are going to die when caught in blistering crossfire? Is this news? Especially when the enemy is deliberately shielding behind them, forcing them into battle zones, and dressing up as them before attacking our soldiers?

That Saddam is hurling his own people to their deaths for his own survival? Is that news?

Maybe that's it. Seeing it on TV, and reading about it in the paper, it's news to a lot of people, now.

I think that's the whole thing now, isn't it? Now, it's news and pictures. Before we arrived, the Iraqi murders were just decades of sterile statistics on paper at human rights organizations.

Since I have mentioned the hundreds of thousands of deaths under Saddam, and it has seemed to make absolutely no impression, I am starting to assume that the only violence that bothers you is violence you have to look at.

Apparently, you would have been just fine if we had left the Iraqis to the status quo, where for the next thirty years hundreds of thousands more could die horribly, but safely out of sight and mind, away from reporters and photographers. Would you have approved had you know? Of course not. You simply wouldn't have thought about it at all.