"Words alone cannot begin to express our regret and sympathy"

It's true that we forget these killings easily -- often we don't notice them in the first place -- since they don't seem to impinge on our lives. Perhaps that's one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country.

One problem, though: the forgetting doesn't work so well in those backlands. When your child, wife or husband, mother or father is killed, you don't forget.

-- Tom Englehardt

(The Weapons That Kill Civilians — Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, 2003–2008 is online here.)