"For most of us who live in countries in which the threat of invasion and military occupation has been negligible or nonexistent for decades, it seems virtually impossible to understand the situation in Iraq with any imaginative vividness. American soldiers are stationed throughout the country in order to enable distant American politicians to direct the affairs and determine the fate of the country and its people in a way that conforms to American interests and values – or at least to the interests and values of the politicians and their domestic supporters. Americans seem incapable of the sort of imaginative identification with those affected by their country’s action that moralists and philosophers had been advocating long before Jesus offered his version in the form of the golden rule. It would never occur to most Americans to imagine that Iraqis might be feeling much the way Americans would feel if Arab Muslim military forces were occupying their national capitol and killing those who sought to resist them. Even most opponents of the war focus their objections on the consequences of the fighting, particularly for the Americans who are being killed there and their families, rather than on the US’s unreflective arrogation to itself of the right to be in Iraq at all. One can despise the insurgents for their vile methods and for the irrational creeds to which they subscribe and yet recognize that they are, all the same, patriots engaged in resisting a foreign occupation of their country."...
