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Redeploy and Loose an Epidemic Philip V. Brennan One must wonder about the ability of politicians and the American public to get the hub of their intelligence around the wheel of reality. Congressional Democrats, almost to a man, along with a growing number of spineless Republicans, and, if the polls are correct, a majority of the American people, have simply thrown up their hands and decided it is time to get out of Iraq.
They are convinced that that game is simply not worth the candle. There has been no dearth of dire predictions of what would be the consequences of a hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces from that unhappy battleground; but when you get right down to it, the attitude of the public and the pols is best expressed thusly: "so what!" Well, I'll tell you what. Failing to hang in there until the Iraqis can handle their internal problems will not only doom the existing government and set in motion a bloody massacre and the ascension of Iranian jihadist hegemony over the entire region, it will turn loose upon the world a homicidal epidemic the like of which as never been seen since the barbarian hordes swept across Europe. Most media attention is focused on the deaths of U.S. forces, which remain lower that the death toll in the Philippine insurrection, and while Iraqi deaths from terrorist actions are mentioned, they are treated as side bars rather than front page stories, or simply blamed on the U.S. The carnage among Iraqis is appalling, and it's not the U.S. forces who are killing innocent Iraqis it's their own people.
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On Tuesday, for example, two bombs killed five people; this one day after a double car bombing tore through a crowded market in the capital in what has been called the bloodiest attack in two months. Last year Sunni vs. Shiite violence left some 34,000 Iraqis dead. And last fall, bombings in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City on one day killed 144 people. According to the Iraqi Health Ministry, more than 17,000 Iraqi civilians and police officers died violently in the latter half of 2006. Moreover, information provided by a Health Ministry official to The Washington Post showed that in the first six months of last year, 5,640 Iraqi civilians and police officers were killed, but that number more than tripled to 17,310 in the latter half of the year. These numbers, however tragic, are meaningless when looked at in the context of what is now afoot in Iraq, and could be loosed upon the rest of the world if left unchecked. Although the anti-war media downplays the story, reports of what Iraqi secularists and jihadists have been doing to their victims are nothing short of horrendous.
The bombings alone give us a clear picture of the state of mind of these people. They show no hint of compassion among those who plant bombs designed to kill the maximum number of innocent civilians their own people going about their daily routines. They see them not as fellow human beings, but as a means of making a political statement. In short, the bombers are inhuman monsters, devoid of any sense of decency or morality. Then, there are those involved in both terrorism and sectarian strife. Every day, large numbers of bodies of kidnap victims are found in the streets and alleyways of Baghdad. Most are headless or have had their eyes gouged out or body parts severed as part of the most excruciating torture their captors wanted them to suffer before butchering them. These are not isolated incidents they have become part of everyday life in Iraq. This is how a certain segment of the Muslim population of Iraq fight whatever struggle in which they are involved, whether in Shiite acts of retribution against Sunnis, or Sunni retaliation against Shiites, or alQaida terrorists seeking to wage war against the United States and our Iraqi allies. It's simply their modus operandi. What we are seeing in Iraq is the presence of a breed of human untroubled by conscience or even the most rudimentary kind of compassion for their fellow humans. In Iraq, these Muslims do not hesitate to kill or torture Muslims in the name of Islam. Thoughts of how they will deal with non-Muslims in the rest of the world once they've driven us out of Iraq should keep us all sleepless. At the present moment, these conscience-less murderers and torturers are confined largely to Iraq. Should we leave Iraq without dealing with them and eliminating them from the face of the earth for good and all, they will be freed to roam the world, bringing their brand of warfare to the West and to the United States. It's a case of an epidemic quarantined within the borders of a single nation. Once that quarantine is lifted, it will sweep across the world and there will be no vaccine to counter it. That's what! Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee, which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.
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