Today 57 people were killed and 200 wounded in Iraq, AP reports:
A wave of bombings ripped across Baghdad on Thursday morning, killing at least 57 people and injuring nearly 200 in the worst violence Iraq has seen for months. The bloodbath comes just days after American forces left the country
The blasts also came on the heels of a political crisis between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite factions that erupted this weekend. The political spat, which pits Iraq's Shiite prime minister against the highest-ranking Sunni political leader, has raised fears that Iraq's sectarian wounds will be reopened during a fragile time when Iraq is finally navigating its own political future without U.S. military support.
In the most vicious display of terrorism, some rescuers and officials were killed when they came to the scene of the first blast to help victims. Only Al Qaeda is said to have the capacity and planning ability for attacks of this type, says AP.
I haven't had time to put entries into this little blog for months -- a blog I keep for my own records, mainly to site in various Internet arguments that claim that somehow, the US is the worst country of the world, killing the most people. It's not, not by a long shot -- some eccentric or sectarian leftists can only claim this by making up stuff, or pretending that somehow "capitalism kills slowly" or something silly like that.
Yes, I will go back and put in entries for when Americans killed children in Afghanistan accidently, or adults in Pakistan. Then I'll go back and put in the entries for all the massive suicide bombings by the Taliban or others killing many more adults and children in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
These types of arguments have kicked up again lately with the death of Christopher Hitchens -- he supported the war in Iraq, ranted against "Islamofascism," and seemed to take a delight in killing enemies. I didn't care for these sentiments myself, but more on him in another post.
The point is, his passing has given people a new surge to say, "Those 100,000 plus people wouldn't have been killed if we hadn't been there."
Worse, they even say, "Saddam killed those extremists, and that's why they were able to do less terrorism."
I think both of these premises, whatever their truthiness, are more complex than they seem, and they let the terrorists off the hook, in the end, even in the version where they appear as Saddam's victims.
Why is it ok to terrorize people to get rid of American troops? After all, these aren't militants fighting for their homeland attacking those American troops. They're terrorists, attacking their own people. Except, they aren't attacking "their own people," unless we assume there's a sense of Iraqi nationhood that doesn't pertain. It's Sunnis attacking Shiites, or other extremist sects, at least in the version of the story explained to us often.
If the terrorists' only message is, "We're free and here to kill you only because a terrible tyrant, Saddam, was defeated who used to put us in mass graves," or "We're free and here to kill you only because the US is here, and we can kill you to try to dislodge them, deliberately, and also kill you because they are ineffective at stopping us, and ineffective at training the Iraqi law-enforcement" -- well, gosh, what a message.
And the "message" is here again today: "We'll go on killing you even after the troops leave, so watch out."
What's particularly infantile in these discussions is to go on expressing indignation that weapons of mass destruction weren't discovered and that "Bush lied, people died." That's really an old chesnut and really silly to go on bleating about at this point.
A weapon that could kill 100,000-plus people *is* a weapon of mass destruction, and one hidden in plain sight.
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