In a followup to this original post, see the CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria where he states, “It would be bizarre to bomb Iran– which means bombing Iranians — now that we have seen the inside of that country.”

In reading the article by Yale Professor David Bromwich, “Iran Was an Easier Enemy Before We Saw Their Faces” on The Huffington Post, two sentences jumped out at me. These two simple sentences, in terms of their structure, didn’t rhyme, didn’t contain a word with more than 3 syllables, lucky for me I didn’t need a dictionary to help me through them. With all of that, I’m not sure I’ve read two more gut-grabbing sentences in some time.

“The faces of the people, and not “the face of the enemy.’” He writes a few lines later, “It isn’t the face of the enemy that we see in these pictures. No, these are people much like ourselves, who don’t want to die at the hands of their government–or at the hands of ours, either, for that matter.”

Face or faces?

For expediency sake, I suspect, we tend to brand a people, a country, a government as a singular entity. It’s a good bit easier to foment blame or craft a label of evil against a Face. Ignoring the varied tapestry of the people’s faces allows us to paint with strokes of a very broad brush.

I’m guilty! Probably, way guilty at times. When I think of North Korea, I think of Kim Jong-il, when I hear of Iran my mind instantly focuses on Mahmoud Amadinejad and now a host of Ayatollahs.  In the Sudan it’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir and in Rowanda, Robert Mugabe. For how ling was the face of Saddam Hussein synonymous with Iraq?

Despicable? One-in-all. But with that myopic nearsightedness, it’s easy to focus a sense of outrage on a Target; but what of the targets?

I need to do a better job at looking through the Face to get to the faces.

As we take umbrage with a foreign Head of State, should we not take a moment to look beneath the umbrella and reflect on the people? When we decry a Dictator and call for military action to oust him/her, should we pause long enough to look at the “dictated” so to speak?

Thanks to Professor Bromwich, the term “surgical strike” doesn’t seem as synonymous with “clinical” to me these days.