It was easier to hate Iran before we say their faces in #IranElection

[Apologies for the hashtags in the titles recently. However, my RSS feed goes straight to Twitter, so I need to keep track there.]

David Bromwich writes:

If you want to kill with a clean conscience, the faces of the enemy had better be blank. Start to see them as human beings and it becomes harder to blockade and bomb them, to mine, and pollute, and “destabilize.” President Clinton had no imagining of the disease he would bring to the innocent in Sudan by the “surgical” missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in 1998. George W. Bush had a happy warrior’s notion of the fury he would unleash on Falluja when he gave the order to destroy that city after the election of 2004. The Sudan bombing was treated by the American press as a distraction from a sex scandal. The second siege of Falluja–tens of thousands of houses crushed or cratered–was hardly covered at all.

From Iran Was an Easier Enemy Before We Saw Their Faces