With the daily news so dismal from Iraq, it’s hard for anything to shock us anymore. We dismiss bombings, shootings and kidnappings as routine. It’s like we’ve lost the capacity for outrage.
But stories about children still have the capacity to jolt even the most cynical among us. And today, 34 children are dead, because extremists are so opposed to progress, that they will pay any price to stop it:
Insurgents detonated three car bombs near a U.S. military convoy in Baghdad Thursday, killing 41 people, 34 of them children, and wounding scores.
In two other attacks, a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a U.S. checkpoint outside the capital, killing two policemen and a U.S. soldier, and a car bomb killed four people in the restive northern Iraq (news – web sites) town of Tal Afar.
The Baghdad blasts coincided with crowds gathering to celebrate the opening of a new sewage plant. It was not clear if the event or a U.S. convoy passing nearby was the target.
The first explosion was followed by two more that struck those who rushed to the aid of the initial victims.
All these tactics – the follow-up bombing targeting the people rushing to help, the use of children as political weapons – have all been practiced and fine-tuned for years by the Palestinians in their ultimate testing ground, Israel. Israelis reading this today probably see it as nothing new. After all, they’ve been dealing with attacks like these for years, against the “Little Satan”. Now that the terror tactics have been perfected, the “Great Satan” is of course the new target.
The terrorists (I refuse to whitewash them as “insurgents”) in Iraq are not legitimate protestors of an occupation that is arguably very wrong. They are not innocent victims. They are opponents of freedom. They sense a power vaccum with Saddam’s Baathist regime gone, and they aim to fill it with their brand of extremist fundamentalism. To do that, they have to be able to point to a massive American failure in Iraq. And to point to a failure, they must create the failure… through bombings, kidnappings, and the like. It wasn’t an accident that today’s attack was carried out at the celebration of a new sewage system. It was a strong message that even the tiniest baby steps towards rebuilding and progress will be attacked.
The mistake that the US made in Iraq was not in pegging the Baathists as “bad guys”. No, it’s the mistake that the US has made in countless other situations: viewing the world in terms of “good guys” against “bad guys”. Not recognizing that, all too often, the reality is “bad guys” against “other bad guys”… sometimes briefly teaming up against a third or fourth set of “bad guys” but rarely uniting, except in hatred against Israel and America.
In the meantime, more innocent civilians continue to die, because the terrorists would prefer to see them all dead than free.