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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Bastards

Today's Last Throe Update involves the lowest form of scum, those who target innocent children.

A suicide car bomber sped up to U.S. soldiers distributing candy to children and detonated his explosives Wednesday, killing up to 27 other people, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. At least 11 children and one soldier were among the dead.


We don't even need to get into the obvious diatribes about how despicable and vile was the motherless fuck who did this, how if there is an Allah, instead of the 72 virgins in heaven, this asshole gets to be someone else's eternal virgin in the ninth circle of hell.

And I don't want to get into how some policy or atrocity of ours "drove" him to this. Bullshit. If life was that hard and meaningless, he shoulda done the world a favor and eaten a bullet. No, this is one instance where the usual moral equivalences don't even make a sound, much less ring hollow.

Now, as to what to do about it? Fuck, I dunno. If this piece of shit's intent was to demonstrate a palpable sense of sheer desperation -- well, mission accomplished, asshole. Aside from that, perhaps the Israelis have a point, in demolishing the homes of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Will they think twice about the remote possibility of Allah's glory in martyrdom, set against the concrete reality of their family being left destitute as payback for their revolting deed? I really don't know. I do know that regardless of what that fucker deluded himself into thinking, he's nothing but a fucking child killer, period.

So, food for thought. Anyway, more noteworthy incidents in this LTU:

A member of an influential Sunni group also said Iraqi security forces stormed several houses in Baghdad early Wednesday and detained 13 people, including a Sunni cleric, before torturing and killing most of them.

One of the dead was a Shiite and the rest were Sunnis, said Sheik Hassan Sabri Salman of the Association of Muslim Scholars.

An Interior Ministry official, insisting on anonymity because of government policy, said the allegation is being investigated.


As we've been saying, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And perhaps Saddam actually knew something we didn't know, didn't want to know -- that this is a highly volatile sectarian state, rife with ancient grudges and violent feuds, and we are simply not culturally equipped to deal with it all.

That doesn't mean that only a brutal thug can keep a lid on everything, but it does mean that our marketing model of Freedom™ and Democracy® may simply not translate as quickly and as readily as we assumed. People want to be free, but they tend to filter such a term through their own cultural mores and religious beliefs, even here.

There may not be a solution to this, at this dreadful point. Pulling out not only leaves civilians to the tender mercies of the suicide bombers (who have been targeting their fellow Iraqis more than our soldiers for some time now) and the corrupt militia, but it really would signal the end of our national prestige for at least a generation. Not only does that mean something, but it will be more important than ever during the next several decades, as we jockey with ascendant China and India over ever-more-scarce energy resources.

Even if Iraq were to resolve itself tomorrow, and we returned home vindicated and with full honor intact, it would be a tough row to hoe. But that is clearly not going to happen, nor is even a bad solution imminent. And all we get from the failed idealists of the PNAC claque that got us into this fucking mess is a continuation of the "stay the course" boilerplate, without any proactive solution.

In the meantime, I hope that whoever killed all those children to prove a point at least didn't corrupt the planet with his rotten seed. May a thousand camels shit on his grave.

1 comment:

Heywood J. said...

Craig:

This is something you & I have discussed before on our podcasts, and I'm sure I'll eventually get around to posting more elaborately on the general subject, but just up and leaving is fraught with its own set of problems, in the usual "great power" sense.

Human nature, and its current organizational paradigm of statism, simply dictates the cold hard fact that there is a hegemon, a dominant entity. You may not like it, I may not like it, but the fact is that our leaving -- no matter how we did it -- would be perceived at large as a tail-between-our-legs move parallelling that of Vietnam, except maybe even worse. And that would pave the way for a Chinese hegemon, or an Indian hegemon.

Personally, I don't particularly care for the way either of those societies are run, and I'd rather inflict our flaws on the world than theirs, if we accept the premise that some hegemon's flaws are to be inflicted in the course of doing business.

It would be nice if we could collectively unfuck ourselves from our current cycle of overconsumption, but failing a complete 180ยบ on our part, the next twenty years are going to be all about competing -- militarily and otherwise -- for ever-scarcer resources.

And even on the smaller, more emotional scale, there is something to be said for not being completely driven out by a subset that is vile enough to murder children getting candy. I realize that war and occupation breed desperation and frustration, but this crime is simply beyond the pale. I'm sure John Wayne Gacy would have done less damage if the rest of the world had just locked up their teenage boys, but fuck, sometimes there really are clear lines of evil deeds.

In the meantime, yeah, maybe we oughta reconsider the beneficent aspects of the candy-dispensing part of the hearts n' minds effort -- if for no other reason than that clearly no action is beneath these insurgents, no deed too low or despicable.

Either way, we have lost the overall effort -- leave or stay, Iraq will not be anything more than a sham democracy for the next generation, and is much more likely to either free-fall into civil war or devolve into another burqaphile shithole. Pulling out right now would definitely facilitate that -- indeed, our presence is probably the only thing that has prevented the Iraqi defense forces from just going medieval on every suspected village in sight. They will almost certainly revert to death squad tactics, and they'll do it straight across sectarian lines. The insurgency are mainly Sunni, but by the operative logic, they'll just wipe out the Sunni villages and let Allah sort them out.

That is the objective reality at this point, regardless of all the entirely correct shoulda/woulda/couldas. The Bushies can rot in hell for what they've already done, but we gotta figure out the least awful way to de-escalate the carnage.

Of course, everyone on all sides of this is now being forced to engage in a gruesome moral calculus of how many lives are "worth" a particular objective -- the calculus naturally being dependent on whether the lives are American soldier or Iraqi civilian. Bad enough that the Bushies forced their supporters to trade in their souls, but they roped people like us into it too. It's the nature of the beast.

Maybe that oughta be Turd Blossom's penalty -- exile in Iraq until he either figures out a way to fix the problem he helped quarterback, or he gets blown apart by a suicidal idiot strapped with ten pounds of Semtex.

This clusterfuck may not have been his bright idea, but he sure as hell made it possible for the braintrust to see it through. Let the punishment fit the crime.