Wolfowitz's response to questions about this incident:

"We are looking into it. And mistakes, pretty ugly mistakes can get made in wartime. And that is again one of the reasons why if you can find a peaceful way to resolve things it is so much better. I would remind everybody here...it wasn't so long before that incident when people were saying 'Why don't you shoot a few looters in Baghdad because looting is causing terrible disruption...'

Frontline arrived late and saw this aggressive demonstration. They closed the scene by quoting the car's owner. What if they had been able to use a quote similar to Wolfowitz's above? Or what if Frontline investigated the situation even more and found out the wood was looted from another family and that they were furious? It's all in the framing and everybody has an agenda and biases.

After reading the comments here, I just had to register to post my own opinion. I think this video is a perfect example of the simplistic thinking and cherry picking of information that will continue to haunt the forward thinking, even with the wealth of opinion and fact that the internet provides.

"Too much like right" is a very appropriate way to describe BB's demonstration. It's agressively simplistic in its framing: throw money at the problem and it's taken care of. It's just ludicrous to say that if you spend $10 billion more on energy research that it WILL cut our oil dependency in half. Likewise, if we throw $25 billion more at world hunger, then all the children will be fed. I wonder if BB remember Somalia and how well throwing money, food, and even enforcement worked over there. Aid can be effective, but it isn't as simple as stacking a couple of oreos.

With that said, our defense spending may be overboard if a true assesment of the threat to our national security could be had. I'd say the nature of government spending, especially defense spending, is to go too far and misappropriate and waste. However, the U.S. has not had any major terrorist events on home soil since 911. Perhaps our spending is a part of this accomplishment, who knows. Not I, nor Ben and Jerry.