Margaret Hassan believed murdered

Al Jazeera believes a video they've received shows a militant shooting and killing the longtime director of CARE in Iraq.

Horrible. Can it get any worse?

I'll say this for the war in Iraq. It has certainly brought to the surface some of the vilest, most depraved specimans on the face of the earth. These scum knew who she was. They knew she wasn't working for the U.S., the coalition, or the acting government. They knew she had lived in Iraq for years, was married to an Iraqi, and was a convert to Islam. They knew that her kidnapping was denounced throughout the middle east.

And still they murdered her.

In past occupations, the goal of the insurgency was to make the occupiers feel pain. But another goal was to build sympathy and support for their cause in the outside world. The insurgents in Iraq -- at least the motherless monsters who did this -- seem to operate under a different, absolutely horrifying scheme. Absolutely horrifying, because a group who conducts a murder that is so disgusting, pointless, and antithetical to the cause of removing the occupiers cannot win. Winning doesn't seem to matter to them. On the contrary it seems. Just the slaughter, that's all that matters. The more violent and shocking the better.

You can't beat them. You can't negotiate with them. You can only kill them. And because this cruelty begets more cruelty from the occupiers, things will only get more savage. More beheadings beget more 500 pound bombs dropped on apartments. More booby-trapped corpses beget more Abu Ghraibs.

And that means the horrors we're seeing in Iraq are going to go on and on.