All Deaths in Wartime Are Brutal and Barbaric

Re “The Enemy’s Shock and Awe,” Commentary, Sept. 28: Michael Keane is so right about our despicable, “gruesome,” “implacable” and “barbaric” enemies who behead innocent and not-so-innocent participants in the Iraq conflagration. They are horrible human beings to subject us to their video perfidy in an effort to frighten us.

Why can’t they be more like we are? Why don’t they spend billions of dollars on cruise missiles and aircraft carriers to launch them and billions more on bombers to rain terror on the cities and towns of their enemies? Why don’t they learn to push buttons from on high to launch weapons of mass destruction on thousands of innocent and not-so-innocent people? That way they don’t have to view the death, the dismemberment and the horror their weapons cause.

But I guess these savages will just never understand about civilization and all its niceties, will they?

Bruce Terrence

Van Nuys

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True, these beheadings are horrible crimes and they shock us to our core. Keane says that such acts express “contempt not merely for an individual’s beliefs or politics but for his fundamental humanity.” Is that any less true than what happens to an innocent family in Iraq who is just settling down to dinner when a 500-pound bomb crashes through their roof, all but obliterating any sign of the human beings who once sat there? There is no nice way to die in a war, no way that is more or less humane.

Jim Calio

Marina del Rey