Light vs. Dark : "You Shall Know Them By Their Fruit..."

President Bush has always presented the war in Iraq as part of an overall "war between good and evil," conflating it with the (so-called) "war on terror." But unless your personal morality rationalizes the use of evil in fighting evil, the last three years has been, to say the least, a bit more complicated than that. Quite properly, the Iraq war (and perhaps the entire war on terror) has been a much better example of a war between two evils. Good has been nowhere to be seen.

America has been in a very dark time.

A few days after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press that the United States would have to go to "the dark side" to fight terrorism.

That dark side included an awful lot of lies, manipulation, and hiding of the truth and eventually pushed us into abandoning the fight against al Qa'ida in favor of a more immediate goal -- regime change in Iraq.

That dark side also brought us torture and an overall contempt for American values. Due process has been all but abandoned. The Bush administration is engaged in an all-out assault on truth.

We have killed over 30,000 Iraqi civilians (by one conservative estimate), roughly 7,000 of them women and children.

Alberto Gonzales has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete."

John Yoo, former legal counsel to the Department of Justice and one of the authors of the notorious "torture memo," in a debate with Doug Cassel at the University of Notre Dame in December 2005, claimed the Bush administration had the authority to torture the child (by crushing his testicles) of a suspected terrorist in the suspect's presence if it were necessary to get information.

We have spied on our own people, and -- far worse -- we seem to have accepted it.

Dark, dark...very dark. I don't believe for a second that the United States -- at this moment -- is engaged in a "war between good and evil." I believe that the United States, under the Bush administration, is doing great evil in the world, and we must stop it.

Matthew 12: 34-37:

(Jesus said) "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good; and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil. But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."