Jesus Sales, a 21-year-old who joined the army to pay for college fees, is the unit’s reserve sniper. He shot a man a few weeks earlier: ‘I didn’t feel anything weird. I just felt satisfied.’

Wilks is equally phlegmatic: ‘Sometimes I feel like I should feel guilty, but I don’t. Everyone I shot deserved it. It doesn’t bother me.’
(Source: The Observer)

Those are the words of two US Army snipers.

They feel happy that they’re shooting Iraqis dead. They feel those Iraqis deserve death for daring to stand up to an army of marauding invaders who have bombed schools, hospitals and mosques. By now, even the stupidest US military know they’re not an army of liberation. If they were liberators, they would have been welcomed by the Iraqi people instead of being shot at. They’re an occupying army fighting native resistance just as surely as the Nazis were in France.

But there’s something else. These two soldiers feel their targets deserve death. They don’t feel guilty. They’re just following orders, doing their part for their country.

Just the same as the people who flew those planes into the World Trade Centre. Human life didn’t matter to them either. What did they care about the thousands of lives they took that day? They probably thought all those innocent people deserved to die. Just the same as the snipers. Did the monsters of 9/11 feel a pang of guilt as they destroyed so many lives? Did they think of the children and families of those they murdered on their insane mission? No.

It’s not a question of right versus left, of Islam versus Christianity, of West versus East. It’s the same as it always has been.

It’s about good versus evil. Anyone who destroys human life so casually, so callously, is evil.

Anyone.