WASHINGTON — As Saddam Hussein sulks in his prison cell,
members of his Coalition of the Evil on the outside have devised
yet another grisly innovation in barbarism. They have moved beyond
simply packing a vehicle with explosives and rolling it up to a
marketplace or some other ill-defended venue before blowing it up.
That was a very successful way to murder women, children, old men,
and young men — the last of whom were volunteering to build a free
Iraq. Now the Coalition of the Evil, composed of Saddam’s faithful,
indigenous religious lunatics, and the terrorists of Mr. Abu Musab
Zarqawi, have doubled the deadliness of their bombers. After
setting off their initial explosions, the murderers wait for
ambulances and rescuers to arrive. They hope large crowds of
onlookers will form. Then they send in more suicidal killers.
This poses a moral dilemma for the prospective rescuers. Do they
rush in to aid the injured and the dying, hoping all the while that
no second round of bombs is planned? Or do they wait, allowing the
injured suffering to suffer and die unattended?
During the bloody 20th century, I cannot recall ever hearing of
the communist revolutionaries or the Nazis attempting this tactic.
Possibly they did. But surely they never employed this gruesome
tactic on the scale of Saddam and Zarqawi’s thugs. As a means of
terror and destruction, it is indeed an innovation. Bearing in mind
that Saddam had turned his country into a vast arsenal with
weaponry lying around that has been estimated to be equal to about
60 percent of our entire conventional arsenal world-wide, there are
probably sufficient explosives in the hands of the Coalition of the
Evil to continue this sort of carnage for a long time. What will
eventually end it is the police action of the American army aided
by the valiant Australians, British, and others from the Coalition
of the Willing. We shall capture the murderers’ leaders or kill
them along with their henchmen.
As a letter from a Zarqawi lieutenant, recovered in a Baghdad
raid, indicates, we are making headway in breaking down the command
structure of the Coalition of the Evil. Zarqawi’s correspondent
writes, “The morale has weakened and lines of mujahidin have become
separated due to some leaders’ action.” The letter was meant for
Zarqawi and goes on to show that there is dissatisfaction among the
mujahidin, which is Arabic, I presume, for murderer. The distressed
murderer goes on to pontificate that “God does not accept such
actions and that will delay victory. We do have big mistakes where
some of us have been discarded.”
For now the Coalition of the Evil is stepping up the carnage
assisted by this recent innovation of attacking rescuers and
onlookers. Perhaps the intelligentsia in France, Germany, and the
other European countries who are so critical of our Iraqi presence
will expatiate on this innovation in their scholarly seminars and
their cafes. Some of Old Europe’s most robust thinking is done in
cafes. In Paris in the early 1940s celebrated intellectuals such as
Jean-Paul Sartre discoursed on the vulgarity of the
English-speaking leaders as the Nazi tourists strolled by. Old
Europe’s history of appeasement goes back a long way and has taught
today’s appeasers nothing. I think President Jacques Chirac and
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would look elegant bearded and in
turbans — though their predecessors from the 1930s generally ended
up in concentration camps.
It is appalling to watch these cowards sit back while Iraqis are
murdered by the thugs of Saddam and Zarqawi, the little Hitlers of
the moment. They actually claim moral and intellectual superiority
to President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and
Australian P.M. John Howard. During the Cold War the predecessors
of these fops made the same claim, but with a difference. Their
intelligentsia had excogitated elegant arguments about how
President Harry Truman missed opportunities to compose peace with
Stalin in the late 1940s. Historians pored over documents that
supposedly implicated the West in starting the Cold War. When the
Cold War was brought to an end by Western resolve at the end of the
1980s these same sophists had more documents and theories
demonstrating that the Soviet Union was not a threat.
In the present conflict the brutes against us are so barbaric
that it is difficult for today’s sophists to argue that the
Coalition of the Evil is not responsible for its atrocities.
Instead their argument is that we ought not to be in Iraq.
Apparently the Iraqis were better off with Saddam, a tyrant who
committed genocide against his countrymen and such ghastly tortures
as putting captives through paper shredders — feet first.
The people of Iraq are suffering today not because of their
liberators but because Old Europe and the United Nations have
failed to join us in investing the country with sufficient numbers
of troops to run the insurgents down quickly. The insurgents are
for a certitude being run down. The carnage will end. Then,
doubtless, the European sophisticates will purr on about
humanitarianism and world peace — matters they have so little
experience with.
