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To make a decision as a country to unilaterally invade and overthrow another country without confronting these images, and weighing them in the moral balance, is pure escapism of the worst kind. The fact that the US media has not had a daily tally of estimated Iraqi civilians killed is shameful; how are we to gauge whether our humanitarian ends justify the violent means if we're sheltered from the violence at every turn? It is not propaganda to be subjected to these images; it is moral accountability. Sitting in that theater, trying not to avert my eyes, I thought of all the times Jeff has invoked his first-person experience of 9/11 in debating the war on terror: seeing the violence and the suffering up close clearly colors everything he has written about our response to the attacks since then -- as well it should. But the media and the government have studiously kept us from comparable images of the violence that we've initiated in Iraq. Has the Bush administration ever released an estimate of total civilian deaths in Iraq? Is this not a relevant number? Shouldn't there be a national debate over how many innocent deaths we're willing to tolerate for the hope of planting democracy's seeds in the country? Is it appropriate, for starters, to kill more innocents than Bin Laden did on 9/11? We don't know, because even raising questions like these might undermine morale. To that I say: if we're not grownup enough as a nation to confront these questions and still support our troops, then we're not grownup enough to be starting elective wars in the first place.

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