Death on the Fortieth
I tend to be dismissive of the previous administration's good and evil, with us or against us, cowboy attitudes toward everything. The idea that you cannot blink when facing the enemy (Sarah Palin's preferred phrasing) to me is more symptomatic of a studied refusal to reason than in any sort of genuine military tactic. There isn't a successful general anywhere who doesn't blink when facing the enemy. They don't just blink, they study the terrain and the conditions, the exhaustion of their troops, they make decisions on when to engage, or whether to engage or retreat tactically and fight another time. When Longfellow tells Lee to withdraw from Gettysburg prior to the battle, he isn't suggesting weakness, he is saying blink, because those guys have the high ground, it's an open field, they are going to destroy us. And Lee clearly should have blinked.
But while the notion of rushing forward like some sort of unthinking unblinking maniac into a foreign country without much of a post occupation plan is rather dumb, at times it seems to me that the left makes rather silly conflations of its own, and fails at times to understand the nature of Al Qaeda and its offshoots and affiliates, collectively this violent Sunni extremist enemy that threatens the United States, and the Muslim world even more quite frankly. (Yes Shi'a extremism is bad too, and threatens US interests of course as well, and so is neoNazi extremism but this post isn't about any of that.)
Here is what happened today. At one of Shi'i Islam's holiest of days, commemorating 40 days from the death of one of Shi'i Islam's holiest personalities, a parked car exploded at the entrance to one of Shi'i Islam's holiest cities, killing a few pilgrims who had come to the city on foot to commemorate. Though perhaps obvious, it bears mentioning that people who walk from Baghdad to Kerbala over a period of days and sleep on the dusty roads and eat whatever food the people of the villages en route can provide are neither decisionmakers nor businesspeople nor professionals, they are simple peasants or the urban poor, come to do a religious duty, and killed by a car bomb at the Qantara Salam gate en route to doing that. The fellow who used to clean my home goes every single year. I never met a kinder or gentler man in all my life. He told me the story, though it's on media outlets as well in largely similar form.
If only that first explosion were all. The car was parked, it was some distance away, it wasn't intended to do much damage. What it did was send a panicked throng of poor villager pilgrims straight back onto the highway and running toward the Holy Mosque, away from the bomb and toward the only Sanctuary they could identify. God and His Holy Imam, the Prophet's Grandson whose body is buried in the mosque surely would protect them they reasoned, get to the Mosque, the Tomb, and all will be well. So they ran on the road in that direction.
Which is precisely what the terrorists had figured they'd do, and which is precisely why they had a second bomb waiting for them on that road, this time detonated by a suicide bomber when the panicked crowd approached. Hundreds were injured, close to a hundred dead.
That's what happened, and the person who thinks you are going to get people who do a thing like that to stop doing it by getting a court to let Saleh Mutlaq and the others excluded from the elections back in, is every bit the roses and perfume hippie stereotype the Bushies would make him out to be.
Now I don't mind letting Mutlaq back in, in fact I tend to have the American bias of let everyone run and let's see who gets what, I'm happy to let Saddam's daughter run too, because I don't think her party will get 5% of the vote. I'll agree that reversing the exclusion would help with reconciliation of millions of disaffected Sunnis who feel shut out of the process. I think reasonable minds can disagree on how shut out Sunnis really are, but we should all agree that reconciliation is a good thing and should be encouraged and we should work towards it.
I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with what just happened at Kerbala, because what happened at Kerbala was perpetrated by people who you don't reconcile with. You don't reconcile with folks who send pilgrims straight into a suicide bomb. What you do to them is you find them, you capture them, you try them, and you punish them severely (I'd say stick needles in their arms but will pull short to avoid a death penalty debate which is a side show. I don't mind if you throw them in prison and toss out the key, I can live with a 3000 year sentence).
Yet for some reason these things are always linked. This stuff is supposed to be connected to the whole election episode. read any media account today and they discuss these events as if one has something to do with the other. The theory seems to be Mutlaq is not included in the elections, and violence rises, and now the court has seemed to let him in and this thing happens which means maybe what the court did isn't enough. As if some group of people is cooking eggs in the morning poring over the court's opinion trying to decide if it's done enough or if they should carry forward with their plan of killing as many poor people as they can who have come unarmed and without property of any kind really to perform a religious obligation. If we were talking of violence against a minister, or against an empty government building, I could understand the theory to some extent I suppose. But we're not. To suggest they are linked is to give this violence legitimacy it cannot possibly deserve, to conflate a reasonable (if contested) belief of insufficient inclusion with tactics so barbaric and inhumane they are painful even to describe.
The fact is the people who did this aren't interested in who is or is not participating in an election, they don't like elections at all. They're probably happy there are exclusions to make the elections seem less legitimate. So by all means let's have some national reconciliation, let's air all the grievances on all sides, because everyone has legitimate ones, Sunnis claim they are excluded, Shi'a claim that Sunnis are in denial of demographics, Kurds claim nothing is being done on Kirkuk, and ask for painful compromises from all. But the reason to do that is to avoid private militias and guerrilla groups, to create a strong state, a functional state, one that serves its citizens well by developing infrastructure, fostering investment, encouraging education, and harnessing its domestic talent. And, yes, absolutely, keeping pilgrims safe from the likes of Al Qaeda through the unabashed use of an iron fist. Iraqis applauded when Maliki did that against the Shi'a extremist Mahdi Army in Basra, they'll applaud when he does it against Al Qaeda. It's got nothing to do with reconciliation, everything to do with crushing an implacable enemy which deserves nothing more than its own destruction.
HAH
But while the notion of rushing forward like some sort of unthinking unblinking maniac into a foreign country without much of a post occupation plan is rather dumb, at times it seems to me that the left makes rather silly conflations of its own, and fails at times to understand the nature of Al Qaeda and its offshoots and affiliates, collectively this violent Sunni extremist enemy that threatens the United States, and the Muslim world even more quite frankly. (Yes Shi'a extremism is bad too, and threatens US interests of course as well, and so is neoNazi extremism but this post isn't about any of that.)
Here is what happened today. At one of Shi'i Islam's holiest of days, commemorating 40 days from the death of one of Shi'i Islam's holiest personalities, a parked car exploded at the entrance to one of Shi'i Islam's holiest cities, killing a few pilgrims who had come to the city on foot to commemorate. Though perhaps obvious, it bears mentioning that people who walk from Baghdad to Kerbala over a period of days and sleep on the dusty roads and eat whatever food the people of the villages en route can provide are neither decisionmakers nor businesspeople nor professionals, they are simple peasants or the urban poor, come to do a religious duty, and killed by a car bomb at the Qantara Salam gate en route to doing that. The fellow who used to clean my home goes every single year. I never met a kinder or gentler man in all my life. He told me the story, though it's on media outlets as well in largely similar form.
If only that first explosion were all. The car was parked, it was some distance away, it wasn't intended to do much damage. What it did was send a panicked throng of poor villager pilgrims straight back onto the highway and running toward the Holy Mosque, away from the bomb and toward the only Sanctuary they could identify. God and His Holy Imam, the Prophet's Grandson whose body is buried in the mosque surely would protect them they reasoned, get to the Mosque, the Tomb, and all will be well. So they ran on the road in that direction.
Which is precisely what the terrorists had figured they'd do, and which is precisely why they had a second bomb waiting for them on that road, this time detonated by a suicide bomber when the panicked crowd approached. Hundreds were injured, close to a hundred dead.
That's what happened, and the person who thinks you are going to get people who do a thing like that to stop doing it by getting a court to let Saleh Mutlaq and the others excluded from the elections back in, is every bit the roses and perfume hippie stereotype the Bushies would make him out to be.
Now I don't mind letting Mutlaq back in, in fact I tend to have the American bias of let everyone run and let's see who gets what, I'm happy to let Saddam's daughter run too, because I don't think her party will get 5% of the vote. I'll agree that reversing the exclusion would help with reconciliation of millions of disaffected Sunnis who feel shut out of the process. I think reasonable minds can disagree on how shut out Sunnis really are, but we should all agree that reconciliation is a good thing and should be encouraged and we should work towards it.
I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with what just happened at Kerbala, because what happened at Kerbala was perpetrated by people who you don't reconcile with. You don't reconcile with folks who send pilgrims straight into a suicide bomb. What you do to them is you find them, you capture them, you try them, and you punish them severely (I'd say stick needles in their arms but will pull short to avoid a death penalty debate which is a side show. I don't mind if you throw them in prison and toss out the key, I can live with a 3000 year sentence).
Yet for some reason these things are always linked. This stuff is supposed to be connected to the whole election episode. read any media account today and they discuss these events as if one has something to do with the other. The theory seems to be Mutlaq is not included in the elections, and violence rises, and now the court has seemed to let him in and this thing happens which means maybe what the court did isn't enough. As if some group of people is cooking eggs in the morning poring over the court's opinion trying to decide if it's done enough or if they should carry forward with their plan of killing as many poor people as they can who have come unarmed and without property of any kind really to perform a religious obligation. If we were talking of violence against a minister, or against an empty government building, I could understand the theory to some extent I suppose. But we're not. To suggest they are linked is to give this violence legitimacy it cannot possibly deserve, to conflate a reasonable (if contested) belief of insufficient inclusion with tactics so barbaric and inhumane they are painful even to describe.
The fact is the people who did this aren't interested in who is or is not participating in an election, they don't like elections at all. They're probably happy there are exclusions to make the elections seem less legitimate. So by all means let's have some national reconciliation, let's air all the grievances on all sides, because everyone has legitimate ones, Sunnis claim they are excluded, Shi'a claim that Sunnis are in denial of demographics, Kurds claim nothing is being done on Kirkuk, and ask for painful compromises from all. But the reason to do that is to avoid private militias and guerrilla groups, to create a strong state, a functional state, one that serves its citizens well by developing infrastructure, fostering investment, encouraging education, and harnessing its domestic talent. And, yes, absolutely, keeping pilgrims safe from the likes of Al Qaeda through the unabashed use of an iron fist. Iraqis applauded when Maliki did that against the Shi'a extremist Mahdi Army in Basra, they'll applaud when he does it against Al Qaeda. It's got nothing to do with reconciliation, everything to do with crushing an implacable enemy which deserves nothing more than its own destruction.
HAH
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