In the world of the left-liberal, there is little personal accountability for evil. Instead, there is always the remote, distant, indirect responsibility that is laid upon the system, the government, the society, political policies, etc. Mr. Berg is merely one reflection of this way of thinking.

The moral responsibility lies with the murderers. The immediate pragmatic responsibility lies with Nick Berg, who was supposed to leave the country and was offered a plane ride out by the State Department representative who spoke with him a couple of weeks before his death. He refused the offer, preferring to go around the country alone, unarmed, looking for work when he had no definite commitment from any employer.

It is nice to see the response at Lucianne.com to the moral corruption of Mike Berg. As Mr. Auster has often pointed out: Berg, and people like him on the left suffer from a kind of mental illness, a spiritual sickness of the soul. To read what this man Berg says in this article about his son’s death is disgusting.

If we were to evaluate the senior Berg’s ravings by normal standards, they are certainly disgusting. I would be more lenient toward the reactions of a grieving father — but not toward the Guardian for exploiting them.

I disagree with Mr. Levine. This has nothing to do with the reactions of a grieving father. There are the reactions of a committed leftist and passionate Bush hater who is using this circumstance to unload his sick moral inversions, his Bush-hatred and his America-hatred on the world.

Mr. Auster is probably right — I was being overgenerous, perhaps, toward a man who had lost his son.

Well, it’s a familiar phenomenon by now. Remember the funeral of Paul Wellstone? A popular and respected (by the left) U.S. Senator suddenly dies, and the Democrats turn his funeral into a shockingly virulent, partisan rally. For the Democratic left, their political hatreds form the core of what they are as human beings, replacing normal human reactions.

Two things, of course, make this worse then what happened with Paul Wellstone. First, with Wellstone, the death was, as far as we know, accidental. Second, at elast in WEllstone’s case, one could make the case that he would have approved of the way his death was used. He might not have, but at the least they were using it to push an agenda that was congenial to Mr. Wellstone.
In Berg’s case, however, his father deliberately used his son’s funeral to push an agenda that was clearly opposite that of his son. This seems to me to be highly disrespectful of his son’s wishes.

Mr. Auster brings up a good point in remembering the Wellstone event. For America the Wellstone funeral was a look at the rancid mind of the left. Most of the the Democratic Party hacks at the event had no clue at how revolted most Americans felt watching this on TV. In one of those rare moments in American politics, this event cost the Democrats a U.S. senate seat.

j.hagan is absolutely correct, and I thank Mr. Auster for bringing up the Wellstone “funeral”/service. I remember hearing the anger from even some on the left because of the way the funeral was “politicized”.

Even more interesting is that Nick Berg’s father didn’t seem to place any great value on what his son believed in. (His son was a passionate Bush supporter.) In my humble opinion, we have a duty to be unselfish when grieving about a lost loved one. It was cheap and opportunistic for his father to do what he did.

It was foolish of these civilians such as Mr. Berg to enter Iraq and was irresponsible of the U.S. to fail to do all that it could to prevent the foolishness. I don’t believe in using people when I know they are acting foolishly. Unguarded contractors and supply convoys are examples of U.S. irresposibility. Someone should have been sacked over the Jessica Lynch incident, even if it was the driven policymakers (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Clinton, etc.) that allowed women in combat zones.

And why haven’t we heard that very likely the prime motivation for the beheading was because Mr. Berg was a Jewish person? I have not heard one peep about his Jewishness except as part of a blurb. Disgusting. It is my understanding that the New York Times has many Jewish employees, which just makes its silence even more disgusting.

P Murgos brings up the pink elephant in the living room question: where is the media on the Jewish connection in the beheading of Mr. Berg ?

N?1-?os raises an interesting point. Nick Berg’s passport evidently had Israeli stamps, which apparently tipped off the murderers about his Jewish identity. In fairness to the US officials on the gound in Iraq, they attempted to persuade Mr. Berg to leave, especially since he was traveling alone and unarmed looking for a job as a civilian contractor, which is crazy in light of what has been going on. Nick Berg may have suffered from a blindness about the true nature of the Jihadis running around loose in Iraq.

There have been several Christian missionaries murdered as well. This has been completely ignored by the leftist media.

I see that my fingers must have been in the wrong place in typing Mr. Murgos’ name. My apologies, Mr. Murgos!

“There have been several Christian missionaries murdered as well.”

When I read this, it was like Nick Berg squared. I saw in my mind’s eye some well-meaning Christian missionary wandering around Iraq helping people, or perhaps working in a hospital or school, and being killed by some savage thugs. And this brings up once again that we began the reconstruction before we had completed the war, so that all these eager, sometimes unselfish and idealistic, Western people came in to help the Iraqis but there’s still this terrorist war going on so the helpers are getting murdered. This is just unacceptable. We didn’t gain control over the country and we still don’t have control over the country, and even if, God willing, it all somehow works out and Iraq gains a functioning government, the failure of the Bush team in this area will be a mark on them in history.

When you think that Bush 41 should have finished the job, but did not, then left the Kurds to die, And now Bush 43 and this mess, no after-war plan, history will not be kind to these two !

Mr. Auster’s last post is 100 percent on target. It is an absolute imperative that we have control of the country - a monopoly on the use of force - before allowing people in the country to help. I heard somewhere that the four American security guards who were murdered and subsquently mutilated in Fallujah at the end of March were guarding food supplies for Iraqi civilians.

What in the hell were Bush and his advisors thinking? Were they thinking at all? The only logical conclusion is that they actually believed in their own ridiculous propaganda about Iraqis being so happy to be rid of Saddam that all the roads would be strewn with roses and an imitation liberal democracy established in short order.

While it is entirely possible that the majority of Iraqis are relieved to see Saddam gone, they are nevertheless conscious of the fact that they are Muslims, whether Shiites or Sunnis, Arabs or Kurds. They are not Western liberals who wax poetic at the wonders of multiculturalism. The whole idea of setting up a “proposition nation” in Iraq only betrays the utter cluelessness of Bush and his advisors to the importance of nationality and culture. This is no surpise in light of their underlying hatred of our own tradtional nationhood and culture.

Actually, I believe that the food was actually to supply the marines, although many people reported it as being for the Iraqi civilians.

Mr. Auster very shrewdly compares Nick Berg’s slaughter and the subsequent exploitation of it to the death of Paul Wellstone and the subsequent exploitation of it by the Democrats. These events really do reveal a sickness, which manifests itself in profound inhumanity.

At the heart of this sickness, as has been observed many times, is a revolt against God, which results in a replacement by politics of the place of God in the lives of sane men.

P. Murgos wrote: “And why haven’t we heard that very likely the prime motivation for the beheading was because Mr. Berg was a Jewish person?”

While I wouldn’t recommend walking around Baghdad with an Israeli-stamped passport, Iraq isn’t Afghanistan. Simply being ethnically Jewish isn’t the same deal-breaker there. Lisa Ashkenaz of Yellow Times and Aaron Glantz of Democracy Now were able to work behind the lines in Fallujah and talk with the jihadis.

Regarding the left press’s silence on murdered missionaries, two years ago Mother Jones did the (pardon the pun) canonical story on Christian missionaries in Muslim countries. It accuses the missionaries of using their tickets home while leaving their new converts behind to be “systematically hunted down and martyred.”

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/05/stealth.html

A “monopoly on the use of force” is one of those political science abstractions which never holds true in the real world (as well as being antithetical to the American ideals of federalism and the second amendment.) Nor does the idea that we could first pacify the country and then reconstruct it make sense to me. Functioning electricity and water and a monetary system are both reconstruction and prerequisites for pacification. Nick Berg absolutely revelled in not following common sense for months without incident before his murder. More troops and more pacification also mean more fatal mistakes and more Iraqi resentment and more American involvement in Iraqi affairs which have to be sorted out to some regard in accordance with Iraqi realities so we can get out of there.

Bush will probably find a way to screw this up, but he’s not responsible for Christian missionaries who choose to enter a dangerous place. Certainly missionaries have willingly taken upon themselves much greater dangers on behalf of their missions throughout history.

It’s hard to tell what Agricola’s point is. He seems to be saying that it wouldn’t make any difference, whatever we did.

On the Wellstone funeral, I forgot to mention that one of the most virulent, partisan speakers, who turned the sudden death of a man in a plane crash into an occasion for rallying against those awful Republicans, was Wellstone’s own son. So the parallel to the Berg case gets closer. The left doesn’t just turn the most basic and tragic human events into an occasion for angry or hateful politics, they do this even with the death of their closest relatives.

(Of course, once again, what Berg said is far worse than what Wellstone’s son said.)

Rachel Corrie’s death while standing in the path of an Israeli bulldozer is another example.

So is the Palestinians’ deliberate martyrdom of their own children.

Provoking the powers-that-be into actions which can be used to portray them as wantonly cruel or indifferent to suffering has always been a part of the radical leftist playbook.

It shouldn’t be surprising that they would similarly exploit an unprovoked or accidental death. The Movement is their ultimate value, and compared to it, family is nothing.

When Jesse Ventura criticizes your manners, you know you’ve committed a faux pas.

The night of Wellstone’s death I went to dinner with a friend at a Minneapolis café in an old Slavic neighborhood going artsy. We had opposing views of the man, but both of us were numbed by the news and assumed everyone else there would be equally somber. We were shocked by the festive mood of the sophisticated crowd, as if nothing had happened. And I’m confident I was the only one in the room who hadn’t voted for the guy.

But those were Wellstone’s voters; his supporters were another animal. It was the same girlish crush you saw in the McCarthy, McGovern and Dean campaigns, only it went on for 12 years. (Thankfully it was contained to a single state, or we’d see 50 times the number of Wellstonites coloring future politics.)

The man had two rare gifts. He could make hard-left positions sound as American as apple pie. And he could contain the emotional beast which drives movements like his, almost like a rodeo cowboy. (He was, unlike Ventura, a real wrestler in his youth.) But he couldn’t control his people from the coffin.

By the way, had he honored his two-term pledge, he would have had time to drive to that funeral, and would still be alive.

I’m sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that civilians will be killed and Iraq will suffer some level of chaos no matter what we do. If this is as bad as it gets, we will have accomplished something nearly miraculous.

I don’t think one can criticize neocon starry-eyed visions of the ease of intervention, and simultaneously feel that our failure to completely control disorder in Iraq to such a degree that civilians face no risk is a “black mark” on Bush’s management of the war forever.

Also, I think that it is unnecessarily patronizing to assume that missionaries are naive and unfamiliar with the risk of operating in Iraq, given how many missionaries have died for their mission in recent times in the near east and elsewher.

Agricola writes: “Also, I think that it is unnecessarily patronizing to assume that missionaries are naive and unfamiliar with the risk of operating in Iraq, given how many missionaries have died for their mission in recent times in the near east and elsewhere.”

Agricola seems to assume that missionaries are so devoted to and ready to die for their mission that they’re indifferent to the specific level of danger in the environment where they’re planning to missionize. That may be true. But it may also be true that missionaries make distinctions between tolerable and intolerable levels of risk, and that the U.S. authorities gave them the impression that there was less risk than there really was.

Again I must apologize for being unclear. I should add that I very infrequently disagree with Mr. Auster’s comments, and my surprise forces me to post.

Missionaries surely have available to them newspapers and even better sources which help them decide the levels of risk they face. Missionaries who have rushed to Iraq after seeing the president give the thumbs up on an aircraft carrier without cannot credibly blame the president for the danger they face. I doubt whether such missionaries exist.

There are many things the president will be rightly judged for when history considers the war. Whether a handful of civilians were killed in a tumultuous occupation can surely not be either unexpected or create a black mark on his record. The argument reeks of sentimentality. To argue in favor of launching the war and then to cavil over such events is contradictory; no such perfect war will ever exist.

I have no intention of reading the article by the father of the tragic Mr. Berg. Thanks to Mr. Auster for the warning. We should remind ourselves of the bravery of Mr. Auster and other commentators for brigning us the awful truth.

There’s no bravery here, Paul. I’m just posting an item at a weblog. :-)

Thanks Lawrence.

Agricola is quite correct about missionaries being aware of the danger they are going into. My original remark was more about he medias blackout of coverage of their murder.

As far as President Bush’s irresponsibility, making a sweeping statement that combat has ended when there was no coherent plan to occupy and exit Iraq is what lies at the heart of the complaint. There have been more soldiers killed in action since the declared end of the war than during the period of acknowledged war. If the place is this dangerous for armed soldiers, why should be allow so many civilians to come in this area? If they insist on coming, they should fully understand that they are in a very dangerous environmnent. I think there’s an implication that things are somewhat calmed down when you declare that ‘major hostilities are ended.’ That statement is objectively false in light of what has been going on there for months now.

Charlie wrote: “Rachel Corrie’s death while standing in the path of an Israeli bulldozer is another example [of exploiting an unprovoked or accidental death.]”

The event held in Montreal on the one year anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s death (March 16) was a far worse misappropriation than the Paul Wellstone funeral. As I understand it, the Wellstone funeral/rally violated neither his family’s wishes nor the principles that governed his life when he was alive.

Rachel Corrie’s story is being used to create a martyrdom cult within the atheistic left, in a way that completely betrays the principles on which the ISM (International Solidarity Movement, the human shields organization to which Corrie belonged) was found.)

They hate the phrase, but the ISM was created to teach the Palestinians non-violence. The original idea was to exploit the Israeli reluctance to fire on a mixed crowd of Palestinians and Americans to allow Palestinians to experiment with non-violent tactics in relative safety. It was originally about extending our safety to them so that they could fight the Israelis in a way that was more palatable to us.

Now that people have died, acting as a human shield has been recast as a test of courage and commitment. Western leftists are getting told that only way they can purge their white guilt is by taking on the same risks as the Palestinians. It’s being turned into the Childrens’ Crusade and it was never supposed to be that.

I was researching the ISM for a series of stories in the summer and fall of 2002. Reading their dispatches from 2000 to 2002, I saw a trend. The level of violence against internationals was slowly but steadily ramping up.

A member who had heard what I was looking into approached me in September 2002 and said, “You don’t know the half of it. The other trend is that training time for the human shields has been cut from two weeks to a one-day pep talk.” Her most charitable explanation was that the ISM leadership was criminally negligent. When she was feeling less generous, she speculated that the ISM had made an executive decision to engineer the death of a volunteer. She said, “At the rate things are deteriorating, someone is going to die in six to twelve months.” That was Sept. 16, 2002. Rachel Corrie died six months to the day after that.