Beheadings were part of the justice system in medieval Europe. The same is true of other parts of the world, notably the Middle East. It was during the time of  the French Revolution that certain revolutionaries thought they were humanizing this cruel punishment by introducing the guillotine. The new machine was supposed to do "the job" more quickly and efficiently, lessening the suffering for the person condemned to death. Danton and others disagreed, and ended up being guillotined for being "too soft" vis-à-vis royalists and other  "counter-revolutionaries."

The death penalty was slow to be discredited, though.
We still remember that people who worked in the mine of  Newscastle and Durham  (England) or in the mining regions of  Scotland were punished by death way into the 18th and early 19th century for "stealing themselves away" from the works. You were not free, as a worker, to leave the mine. It was "theft," and theft in Britain was punishable by death at the time. It is  not so long ago that 11-year-old kids were strung up in England for pinching a loaf of bread. We just have to go back to the early 19th century, with all the misery it entailed for working people and the underemployed poor.
More recently, during World War II, prisoners of war, slave workers in the armaments factories,  and toward the end of war, even 14-year-old children of the supposedly superior "German" race, were killed for steeling a piece of bread, by German authorities.

In the supposedly free United States, the death penalty is not meted out in many states simply for murder. There are scores of "crimes" which, according to their medieval laws, demand the death penalty.
We can argue a lot about whether lethal injections in Texan death cells are more human than beheadings carried out in Iraq today by members of (if we are not mistaken) the value-oriented Islamic Right.

And yet, today, in many parts of the world, millions of people object not only to the guillotine, to decapitation by the sword, to hanging, but also to lethal injections and the electric chair. In the last analysis, they argue, man has no right to take another man's life. It is atavistic to kill, and we should leave old ways behind us. If, in the past, the maxim "an eye for eye" meant a progress of civilization, this is so because those who taught this maxim wanted to exhort their fellowmen not to be excessive and not to take more than an eye, for an eye.

The war against Iraq, in our opinion, is a shameless crime.We do not stand alone in this condemanation of the United States government and its reckless policy, Repeatedly, the Pope has condemned this war. Members of the Europoean parliament, meeting in session, brandished posters declaring the war was illegal. Scores of experts of international law have pointed out that the war was in breach of international law and violated key tenets of the United Nations. More recently, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Kofi Annan, in a rare moment of frankness, has called the war illegal and admonished the United States government to refrain from violent action in the illegally occupied country.

Does an illegal occupation justify resistance?
Yes.
Does is justify armed resistance? - If you are a follower of Ghandi, or Thoreau and other proponents of non-violence, no. Some 2000 years ago, the man from Nazareth, son of a carpenter Dylan mentions in his songs, felt violence was only leading to more violence. Buddha, the son of a North Indian king who said good-bye to riches and power and chose a simple life close to the masses and close to nature, seems to have felt the same.

But there are those who feel and think that only counter-violence can reign in violence, and  that the suppressed have a right to revolt. 
Was the armed revolt of the American colonists against the British crown justified in 1776?
Was the armed struggle of the ANC against the Apartheid regime justified in South Africa?
Was the FLN right when it took up arms against France and freed Algeria?
Is the Palestinian people to be asked to humbly suffer in makeshift refugee camps for another 5 or 6 decades, or do they have the same right to resist as the Ukrainian Jews who fought Nazi troops as guerillas in the swamps of Wolhynia?
If you believe in the right to resist oppression (if necessary, by taking up arms), can you really denounce the Iraqi resistance that has formed to struggle  against U.S. neocolonialist occupation of their country?

Today, many Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Christians condemn the US-led occupation.
Many do not feel represented at all by the puppet regime installed by the occupiers. (Of course, most of the Kurds may see that in a different way; the Kurdish people has been denied its most basic rights by all of the neighboring countries in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Only full independence can offer a way out for them, and can in the end lead to their insertion into a finally cooperative, democratic, and progressive Middle East: a vision that can never be the result of American neocolonialist interference, and that can only spring from the determination of the population of this region to seek full emancipation.)

If resistance, however, is legitimate - are the beheadings the press and  the electronic media report, to be seen as an acceptable means to liberate the country from U.S. domination?

Aren't they as atavistic as the Texan gas chambers or lethal injections?
Aren't the perpetrators of these deeds just as brutal as Mr. George Bush when he giggled while telling journalists about the pleas of a convicted Texan woman to spare her life?

We well remember what caused this chilling reappearance of a medieval form of killing. 
Wasn't it the Bush administration which pronounced that it was offering a reward "on the head" of a certain Muslim cleric whom they wanted, "dead or alive" ?
Soon after that pronouncement, the Americans in Iraq got their first head. It was not that of the cleric in question, a member of a well-respected family of Iraqi clerics with a long history in spearheading national resistance against foreign occupiers (the British, above all).  It was the head of a hostage.

Yes, we think the decapitation was inhumane and an atavistic act. No argument that such action can intimidate foreigners from coming to Iraq and supporting the occupiers can truly justify it. We remember well that today, the ANC is ashamed of having used torture, in some cases, against Africans suspected of collaboration with the South African police state. If Fascists resort to all means,  if for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, the end justifies the means, if former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright justified civilian Iraqi casualties in a war supposedly waged in order to remove the bloody dictator Saddam Hussein from  power by commenting in her blunt fashion, "That's the price," they all represent a position that regards people's lives as worth very little...    Progessive and enlightened citizens who embrace the goal of human emancipation can never act likewise, without risking to lose all credibility.

The people who resist US occupation in Iraq come from many camps, and their convictions may differ in many respects. Tolerance and open debate between the various factions would help them to unite constructively. 
Shiites, Sunnis, Christians and non-believers who are interested in a free and democratic Iraq today have one common adversary: the forces deployed in Iraq by the Bush administration and its British, Polish and Italian vassals. This respectable resistance will be ashamed forever that among its ranks there were those who resemble the Christian Right: intolerant, unenlightened people, full of resentment, and ready to take literal in the most dogmatic ways the ancient sayings of ancient teachers who, at their time, played a positive role but who, when taken literally, throw us back a thousand years. An eye for an eye? No, never.