Perspective

The US military fighting in Iraq is a professional organization, not a conscript army, and it is without doubt the most skilled, restrained, and discerning force, as well as the most lethal, ever put into the field by any nation. The ridiculous media kerfluffle over a US Marine shooting a wounded terrorist in Fallujah has mostly lacked any realistic perspective on the conduct of close quarters infantry warfare. It also lacks realistic perspective on what "bringing evildoers to justice" has typically amounted to during wartime.

The liberation of concentration camps in WWII is a proud national memory for the American and British people, as well it should be. That memory does not, however, carry much notion of what that liberation involved. This Dachau Scrapbook article (by way of http://www.belmontclub.blogspot.com/) describes in words and pictures the actual events surrounding the liberation of Dachau by our Greatest Generation. This is from a larger site, but this page, plus the pictures and text linked by "continue" at the bottom, tell the story. It's worth remembering, too, that these events are trivial compared with those surrounding, for example, the liberation of Berlin by Soviet forces or the aftermath of the German surrender at Stalingrad.

Byron