Still winning the hearts and minds. Yeah right.

Our understanding of what will please the Iraqi people seems to be decreasing rather than increasing. For instance, the fact that we are still parading around the corpses of the Hussein brothers, although now with gobs of mortician's wax on their faces instead of gashes and bruises, grosses me out. And I have no religious feelings whatsoever. I can only imagine what devout Iraqis must feel about it.

"Showing dead and deformed bodies on TV is not acceptable," protested Amer Ahmed al-Azawi, a 55-year-old Baghdad merchant. "But the Americans are criminals and unbelievers. We got rid of one tyrant, and we ended up with a bigger one."

Hamza Mansour, secretary-general of the Islamic Action Front in neighboring Jordan, said the display violated Islamic custom.

"The bodies of Odai and Qusai should have been washed, shrouded and buried immediately, but the Americans have no respect for our traditions and doctrine and they acted in a very unethical manner," he said.

I think if we wanted to display our cultural ignorance any more obviously, we would have to actually try. Or is that not what we're doing? Sometimes I'm not sure anymore.

And then there's still this factor.

Their faces were reconstructed by morticians and medical personnel, a common practice in the West and not a bid to fool Iraqis, according to a doctor involved in the autopsy, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The people who we have "liberated" don't trust us further than they could throw one of our tanks. With our President lying about the reasons we invaded their country in the first place, how can we blame them?

*UPDATE** It seems like not giving the Hussein brothers a proper Muslim burial may really be pissing some people off.

"What happened is a mutilation of the body of the dead," said Souad Saleh, an Islamic theologian who sits on a committee entrusted with issuing fatwas, or edicts, at Egypt's Al-Azhar University, the world's highest seat of Sunni Muslim learning.

"But the Americans are infidels, and whatever Islam says doesn't apply to them," he said.

...Sheik Abdul-Aziz al-Qassim, a Saudi lawyer and a former judge, said the handling of the bodies by U.S. authorities in Iraq contravened Islamic law as well as the rules of war, arguing that Odai and Qusai died as soldiers who died in battle.

"It goes against Islamic sharia laws to display bodies of fallen soldiers to influence enemy morale," said al-Qassim, who spoke from the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

Another scholar from the Gulf Arab region saw the display of the bodies as inhumane, although he described the two sons as criminals.

"This is a political game to instill fear in the hearts of others that follow their path or support them," said Sheik Adil Isa, a Sunni Islamic scholar from Bahrain.

Emphasis in that last bit is mine. I really am loathe to try and please anyone who would call me an "infidel", but the fact is that conservative Muslims are exactly the people we should be trying to impress with our respect and finesse in the Middle East right now. Besides, what we have done to these bodies is apparently so repulsive to them that even those who denounced the Husseins as criminals are creeped out by it.

Heck, I'm creeped out by it.

In any case, this is definitely a social faux pas at best and a barbaric and savage act of gloating at worst, and at a time when we need to proceed as delicately as possible in preserving the teensy shreds of respect the world still has for our nation.