It's not surprising that Americans react with these feelings and more when they see members of our armed forces mutilated or killed by armed Iraqis. Many of us have, at best, mixed feelings about the war in Iraq and the risks our government forces soldiers to take each day, in an effort to bring 'democracy' to this often disturbing and confusing part of the world.

It's easy to hate. It's easy to simply believe all Iraqis, all Arabs or all Moslems are fanatical killers, bent on the destruction of all things, and all people, American.

My father fought in World War Two, and, to this day, speaks angrily of the Germans, pointing out that they said they had lost the war because "we ran out of gasoline and supplies", not because they were, in fact, wrong in their quest for world domination. I'm sure that some of them did feel that way - but I am just as sure that there were thousands of Germans who were neither directly or indirectly involved in the slaughter of my kinsmen, whether in battle or in concentration camps.

In the age of instant reporting and hand-held video, pictures speak loudly and leave all too little to the imagination. Burned bodies hung from bridges hardly allow for much consideration of the humanity of an enemy - even if that enemy is only a small part of the total population of the Moslem world. To tar all Iraqis or all Moslems with the brush of "savage" is to make an ignorant, inaccurate choice. Incidents like are just one facet of an ongoing conflict, one piece of an intricate puzzle that will be better defined by history than by the evening news.

Consider for a moment how the rest of the world views us, as presented on the evening news in June of 1998. James Byrd Jr., a black man hitchhiking in Texas, was murdered, his throat cut and his body dragged for three miles behind a pickup truck and left in front of a predominantly Black church. This murder didn't take place 'back in the day'. This wasn't the social upheaval of the sixties. This was 1998, only a few years ago. He was killed by the kind of American that most of us wouldn't care to be associated with. Judging me, or any American, by the actions of Mr. Byrd's killers would be an inaccurate assessment of America as a whole. The same is true of people on the other side of the planet.

One might look to the words of Muhammad Khalifa, who objected to the mutilations by saying, "We may hate Americans. We may hate them with all our hearts. But all men are creatures of God."

I suggest we take a deep breath and remember that while there may always be savages among us, as a people we are not our lowest common denominator and we strive every day to become and remain a civil and just society, even in the face of conflict. Many of us here in America want this war to be over and consider this horror, and all those killed on both sides, to be a waste of lives. It isn't a great leap to believe that many of those with whom we fight feel the same way.