"Violence Doesn't End Violence"

So says Mariane Pearl, mother of Adam Pearl, wife of the late Daniel Pearl. You probably remember Danny Pearl; he was 2002's Nick Berg. (2003's Nick Berg was supposed to be Jessica Lynch, but she is not following the script.)

Last night here in Milwaukee, Mariane Pearl spoke as a part of a local lecture series known as "From the Heart." Other speakers on the list are Fergie, Naomi Judd, and Sharon Stone. Also included in the series, though, was Kim Phuc Phan Thi, who most of you probably recognize from this picture. (Here's what she looks like now.) Caveat: I did not actually see either lecture, Pearl's or Phan Thi's.

I'm not really known for writing about the war. I started blogging for real only about a year ago, a while after "Mission Accomplished," and in the run-up to the war I let others more qualified than I make the case against it. But, by accident of geography, I have something to say about it now, from Mariane Pearl and Kim Phuc Phan Thi, who recently graced my town with their presence.

We can blame the death of Nick Berg on anyone we want, it seems. Al Qaeda is an easy one, though the terrorist in question, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was at best only a sometime ally of Osama bin Laden, not full-blown al Qaeda. CBS is another easy target, one that conservatives have not neglected, for airing photos of Abu Ghraib torture. We can blame the Abu Ghraib culprits. Or the Iraqi police and U.S. forces that held Berg past his scheduled departure date. Or Rumsfeld. Or the Bush administration in general (especially with news that given the chance to capture Zarqawi, the administration passed to bolster its case for war).

But I like what Mariane Pearl said about the matter:

Those who killed Danny and those who killed Nicholas Berg are despicable people but violence doesn't end violence. [. . .] It's a horrendous murder similar to the one Danny went through, and proof that violence leads to violence. This cycle of violence is not likely to end.

Terrorists like al-Zarqawi (or al Qaeda) don't need an Abu Ghraib to retaliate for, of course. They are fighting what they perceive to be a war against decades, if not centuries, of Western aggression and oppression, of which Bush's War is just the latest example. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knows that eye-for-an-eye revenge cycles solve nothing and advance no causes but bloody violence.

Kim Phuc Phan Thi speaks out against these cycles of violence whenever she can. She's a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace, and sees her role as a peace activist as divine. "God used me that day," she says about the day her village was napalmed and the infamous photograph was taken. By most accounts, the image of a naked, burned, screaming child on the cover of every major daily paper in this country began the turning of the tide. Public support for the Vietnam war ebbed, and serious questions about our tactics and conduct in the war followed. Phan Thi, since her defection to Canada in 1992, has continued the work for peace that her picture began. "Sometimes I like to think of that little girl, screaming, running up the road, as being not just a symbol of war, but a symbol of a cry for peace," she says in her speeches.

The photos (and, potentially, video) from Abu Ghraib, before they were replaced in our consciousness by images of Nick Berg, could have been the same turning point in this war as Phan Thi's was in Vietnam. They may yet be. And what disturbs me most about them, aside from the very real chance that the tactics depicted therein were not just sanctioned but ordered by U.S. commanders, is the underlying current of payback. This includes new allegations that some of the abusers/ torturers very clearly had Jessica Lynch in mind as they performed their outrages at Abu Ghraib and in particular Camp Bucca.

I said before that Jessica Lynch is not following the script that Danny Pearl and Nick Berg did, and by that, I don't mean that she escaped death. I mean that Pearl's death did and Berg's death is currently fueling very real, very dangerous levels of "Let's go kill us some brown-skinned people!" Don't believe me? Drop by some bastions of the right blogosphere (y!sctp!), like LGF, the Freepers, or those rottweiler guys.

But Lynch, like Phan Thi and Mariane Pearl, is not calling for more blood. She is not calling for genocide, extermination, carpet bombing. She is not enabling the bloodthirsty mob.

And the Berg family, too, is placing the blame somewhere besides the Muslim world. They are laying the blame squarely on us. To an extent, this is because Nick Berg was detained by Iraqi police and (possibly) CPA forces. But the Bergs were against this war from the start. They knew, as I did, and probably many of you, that taking revenge on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people--for surely innocents would die--was not the answer to any reasonable question. It was not a key step in the "war on terror" or toward advancing any plausible national interest. It was Bush's revenge for the Gulf War's failures; it was the American public's revenge for 9/11 after bin Laden proved illusive and Afghanistan proved unsatisfactory.

Listen to those who know, please. Listen to Jessica Lynch, Mariane Pearl, Kim Phuc Phan Thi: Violence does not end violence!