Saturday, Aug. 6, was the 60th anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear age--the day that America deliberately targeted and incinerated the non-military city of Hiroshima in as pure an act of mass terror as mankind has ever committed. This attrocity was followed days later with a second mass terrorism act--the incineration of the city of Nagasaki. Those two bombs killed several hundred thousand innocent civilian men, women and children and condemned tens of thousands of others, including many yet unborn, to live tortured and painfully abbreviated lives.

This same nation, and its allies, committed similar attrocities that year in the fire bombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden and Darmstadt (the latter two cities had no military importance, but were simply displays of military power--what today is called "Shock and Awe").

It is appropriate that we should reflect on these earlier genocidal crimes (which even Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. Curtis LeMay condemned as unnecessary) committed by our own nation as Washingon pushes ahead with George Bush's War on Iraq and his "War" on Terror.

25,000 civilian Iraqis have been documented as killed in this war, mostly by US forces. The figure is probably really more than four times that high, and continues to mount as American troops employ their high-tech weapons engineered to kill indiscriminately--anti-personnel bombs that look like toys and that lie around for years, depleted uranium shells that spew out radioactive dust, gunships that can obliterate several acres in seconds, high-powered bullets that kill even when they hit an arm or a leg, landmines, new stickier napalm. The list goes on and on, all financed by our tax dollars.

It has been quite accurately stated that the only difference between a terrorist cell and an army is that the army has tanks and planes to deliver its bombs, while the terrorist has to use a backpack.

We'd all do well to ponder this as we commemorate the dropping of the first nuclear weapon.

The war we are fighting has again made us a terrorist nation. There is no denying this reality.

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