And he doesn’t get any uglier. This blurb from Michael Yon’s Second Chances dispatch gave me chills:
The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.
Iraq is complicated, but this fight could not be simpler.
We are the good guys. They are the bad guys.
And these particular bad guys need to die in a bad way.
While particularly brutal, this is not all that different from the tactics employed by the VietCong in SVN. Whatever villages did not comply were usually cowed into complying and supporting the VC through terror techniques. Usually the village elders or chief were publicly tortured or executed and their family members made to watch. Everyone else quickly agreed to hide weapons and rice.
Again, it goes back to the issue of security. Now that U.S. forces are back out living in the neighborhoods, this sort of thing may be less effective. However, there are still times and areas where American troops have to head back to their base… and that’s when the bad guys come.
I wonder why the Army did not take an approach similar to the Army’s CIDG program or the Marine’s CAP program of Vietnam. Both were pretty succesful (unfortunately, they were applied in a limited manner). The main strength was that it enabled the LN’s to defend themselves.
Perhaps current tribal/religious/ethnic concerns overrode the benefits of such a program. We’re not directly arming the various militias, and they’re still at eachother.
Sweet mother of God…..
If anyone is a Warhammer book fan, especially the ones about that vampire lady… am I the only one seeing a likeness between the ultimate, undying evil being and these folks?
I have long thought that America was suffering from an inability to recognize evil. You know, always the interview that the murderer next door “seemed like such a nice boy”, or he can’t be blamed because society failed him, etc..
The MSM can not report this as they can’t wrap their liberal minds around it. Evil exists. It is not a figment of religious weirdos’ imaginations.
If evil does exist what can and must be done about it? They don’t like the answer. It must be defeated, it can not be appeased, excused, coddled, or ignored. They may not like the truth, but that is the truth. And thus, they are confounded. There is a Bible verse to that effect but could not remember where it is at the moment.
Joel, couldn’t really find any part of your analysis that I disagreed with….suppose that’s why Petraeus is placing such an emphasis on permanent ‘outside-the-wire’ ops.
Which makes sense to me.
Still, evil bastards…these guys.
I remember once, after a week of starving and being beaten for about eighteen hours in the freezing cold desert during SERE training that I had a mental snap with reality. The instructors were no longer Americans simulating prison guards, they were real. And I was going to kill every last one of them if it took me the rest of my days.
Of course as fate would have it I worked nearly a year later at SERE as an admin weenie and got to know all those instructors. Fine people, every one of them.
I have two sons. I would have to say that I am fortunate to be an American because the same rage that I felt after being starved and whupped good rings through my head right now. We must win. My sons will not suffer the same fate and God help the opposition if they ever did…