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Pray for the Two MIAs John LeBoutillier
It is going to be a rough road for the two missing U.S. soldiers who were abducted Friday night from a roadblock when insurgents cleverly split the American contingent apart. The two soldiers were apparently last seen being marched off and loaded into a car by up to nine masked insurgents. So much for the predicted "fall-off of violence" now that Zarqawi has been killed. Indeed, things have continued unabated in the nine days since his death. At least 36 people were killed in bombings on Sunday - and numerous kidnappings were reported, as well. Clearly there is an "intelligent" force directing this widespread, systematic, well-planned insurgency. And there is also huge support among the Iraqi people for attacks on American soldiers: In a new poll, 47 percent of the Iraqi people support attacks on U.S. soldiers.
If that is true, then our continued presence in Iraq is a futile exercise. An "occupation" cannot work well if there is widespread resistence. If the Iraqi insurgency is now targeting US soldiers - as has been reported over the past several weeks - then the tone of this war will change. Capturing Americans is a sure-fire way to enflame the American people and, in effect, to escalate the war itself. What we don't yet know about these two missing soldiers is, will they be videotaped and that tape used for propaganda purposes? Will they be ransomed? Will they be taunted and beheaded like other hostages? Will they just fade from view like Sgt. Keith Maupin? Will they be "punished" as payback for Abu Garaib? Or will they be used to try to break the will of the American people to keep fighting this seemingly-never-ending war? Most worrisome is that, under G.W. Bush's administration, we have purposely dissed international agreements, especially the Geneva Convention's on the holding and treatment of captured military personnel. Because of this, these Iraqi insurgents may feel free to abuse and torture and humiliate these two GI's - as a vindictive form of payback. All the domestic debate here about the efficacy and morality of torture may come back to hurt us now - or to hurt these two soldiers. We have no leg to stand on as we long ago abandoned the moral high ground when we began invoking torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. These two soldiers - and others yet to be captured in this and future conflicts - will be the unwitting victims of a stupid policy that has done nothing but hurt America's image worldwide. Even Mr. Bush himself now acknowledges that those photographs from Abu Ghraib have severely damaged the United States.
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All our previous enemies have discovered the value in holding American soldiers as prisoners. They are useful for both ransom and for propaganda. Also, under torture, sometimes combat secrets can be extracted - although in this case it is less likely than with captured officers or airmen.
Because we care about the lives of each and every soldier, we are paying attention to the fate of these two men. Our news media is leading the news each cycle with updates about the search. (Was it only nine days ago that we were celebrating the death of Zarqawi? Oh how things can change.)
If we can rescue these men alive, it will be a huge victory; if we don't, it will be seen as yet another sign of a war gone bad with no end in sight.
Our Congress voted on Friday against a "date certain" withdrawal of our troops. But no one is considering a more simple idea: Telling the new Iraqi government that it is now up to them to run their own country. We've birthed their democracy and poored billions of dollars and 2,500 lives into their freedom. It is time that we took the training wheels off and they learn to defend themselves.
There is no useful reason American soldiers are now dying in a decades-long fight between Sunni and Sh'ia - a fight that has nothing at all to do with 9/11, or Osama or a threat to America. Iraq is a nation that never should have been. It is three peoples crammed together by the British decades ago - and then kept under the jackboot of a Ba'ath Party dictatorship. Now, thanks to our liberation, these three peoples are free - but some of them are using this newfound freedom to settle old scores and perform ethnic cleansing, just like in the former Yugoslavia. This mess will not be tolerated much longer by the American people. The upcoming November elections will go a long way to determining whether the "stay-the-course" plan can continue - or instead we begin to disengage. The capture of these two soldiers is a microcosm of the war itself: How long will America be held hostage by a war with no end game?
Editor's note:
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