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.
