A New Form Of Evil

"As a young man, in 1974, I was riding on a bus traveling from Beirut to Damascus. The man I sat next to was an English-speaking Iraqi whom I asked at one point in our conversation, "Can you describe your nation in a sentence?" "No problem," he immediately answered. "We Iraqis are the most barbaric people in the world."

I obviously never forgot that man's words, and therefore anticipated great cruelties in Iraq. But neither I nor anyone who predicted a civil war had so much as a premonition of this unprecedented mass murder of the men, women and children among one's own people as a military tactic to defeat an external enemy.

It is, therefore, unfair to blame the Bush administration for not anticipating such a determined "insurgency." Without the mass murder of fellow Iraqis, there would hardly be any "insurgency." The combination of suicide terrorists and a theology of death has created an unprecedented form of "resistance" to an occupier: "We will murder as many men, women and children as we can until you leave." Nor is this a matter of Sunnis murdering Shiites and vice versa: college students, women shopping at a Baghdad market and hospital workers all belong to both groups. Truck bombs cannot distinguish among tribes or religious affiliations.

If America had to fight an insurgency directed solely against us and coalition forces -- even including suicide bombers -- we would surely have succeeded. No one, right, left or center, could imagine a group of people so evil, so devoid of the most elementary and universal concepts of morality, that they would target their own people, especially the most vulnerable, for murder.

That is why we have not yet prevailed in Iraq. Even without all the mistakes made by the Bush administration -- and what political or military leadership has not made many errors in prosecuting a war? -- it could not have foreseen this new form of evil we are witnessing in Iraq.

That is why we have not won.

There are respectable arguments to be made against America's initially going into Iraq. But intellectually honest opponents of the war have to acknowledge that no one could anticipate an "insurgency" that included people leaving children in a car and then blowing them up." [ Please note that none of this would have slowed the (real) Nazis one whit. They simply would have pitched in and helped slaughter the same civilians with gas chambers just like they did in WWII. Which leads me to the key weakness in Prager's thesis: The Nazis did in fact slaughter their own civilians -- it's just that this was not a tactic to repel the Allies! As the wise old Indian teacher said, if Ghandi had been protesting against the Nazis instead of the British he would have quickly been made into a lampshade (or something close enough to it). The Islamists are doing this in equal parts to repel and trick us -- my apologies to all you BDS sufferers out there but neither I nor my second cousin in the 82nd Airborne (or my uncle in the 82nd Airborne in WWII) are most assuredly not Nazis -- as well as intimidate Iraqis into complicity. They have redefined the dictionary entry for "ruthless men". And will do so again as WMD technology continues to filter into their hands... -ed. ]