5000 years ago artists depicted the torture of naked prisoners in Uruk, now called Iraq. The clay seal pictured here is one example of prisoners of war being beaten with sticks. The torture continues, today.
“On this cylinder seal impression from Uruk (c. 3200 BC) the ruler armed with a spear stands before naked and bound prisoners.”(12, p. 194)
Bronze Age, Mesopotamia
(http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/religion/arcproj/war/Essaythree.html)
(Note: this link no longer works, but it was the source of the photo and quote above.)
Saddam, Bush, and now the Shia have incorporated torture. The Tigris and Euphrates run red with the blood of millennia of violence. Is it likely to cease?
Are we bringing democracy( or more to the point, capitalism) to Iraq; or are we setting the stage for the rise of a new Saladin -- the liberator born in Tikrit-- to free the East from the oppression of the West? Though the Shia continue to torture the Sunnis in revenge for the rule of Saddam, 80% of Iraqis are united in wanting to overthrow the rule of the West, in wanting the U.S. military to depart. Like the Roman Catholic crusaders, the U. S. forces are the enemy of the Moslem world, uniting it as surely as the crusaders united it a thousand years ago. Our meddling in another culture courts disaster for our own.
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