Awful, Period
By Montag | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Ideas, WarUS troops were handing out candy at a water treatment plant opening in Baghdad…
At least 26 Iraqis, almost all of them children, have been killed by a car bomb in south-eastern Baghdad.
A US soldier is also said to have died in the blast. Another three US soldiers are reported to have been injured.
BBC News: Children die in Baghdad car bomb
Fight against the troops of what you consider a hostile occupier trying to exert control over your country from thousands of miles away and I will probably empathize with you.
Send a desparate person — one of your followers — to blow themself up along with a group of your own citizens (children!) and I will despise you.
Perhaps that is the point. Seems irrational.
Have I just stumbled into the meaning of “extremism?”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Ideas, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 13th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
U.S. troops passing out sweets to children in front of a water treatment plant America helped pay for and build (a point on which the BBC is typically silent) doesn’t seem to fit my definition of “hostile occupier trying to exert control over your country from thousands of miles away.” I don’t know how you want to define extremism, but this jihadi fits my definition of “deluded dumbass.” No empathy from here in either case.
July 13th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Both sides have been guilty of innocent collateral damage. That’s war. It just so happens that this case is particularly tragic. I wish there was some way we could reach out to those families and help them.
July 13th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
You presume to know the suicide bomber didn’t intend to kill those children. I’m not getting a strong sense of moral equivalence here. Civilians killed peripherally to a military operation is war’s tragedy. Deliberately blowing up children is mass murder.
July 13th, 2005 at 11:08 pm
Do you suppose, for instance, that jihadis go out in their bomb-laden death cars with a laminated card in hand, issued by their commanders, ordering them, among other things,
July 14th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
My aim was not to say they didn’t intend to kill the children. But if the solders weren’t there, do you think the children would have been targeted anyway? I seriously doubt it. That’s the point I’m trying to make.
And as far as the laminated cards go…well, let’s not get into straw men here.
In any event, I’ll restate again that it’s a tragedy and I wish I knew of some sort of relief fund for the families who’ve lost loved ones to these terrorists’ attacks because I’d like to promote it on this blog in a second.
July 14th, 2005 at 9:18 pm
You have missed a couple of salient points about this particular attack.
1. It is likely that the bomber wasn’t from Iraq, so his action wasn’t an attack against a hostile occupier of his country. It was a deliberate attack on the soldiers who are supporting the democratically elected government of Iraq, and the children who welcome those soldiers into their neighborhoods.
2. The bomber knew there would be children around the HMMWV. There always are; take if from one who was there and will return there again soon.
3. It is highly unlikely that the bomber was “desperate” to do something about the US soldiers. It is much more likely that he was simply acting, without any sense of desperation whatsoever, on what he believed to be a mission from his god.
4. Your best support for the parents would be keeping your money in your pocket, and instead, stop making up excuses for the terrorists who blow up children. The parents have other children who deserve a better life. Those children can either grow up in the very first arab democracy in the history of our world, or they can die at the hands of terrorists who know how to manipulate the western media enough to ensure that there are Americans who think this was a “desperate” act committed by an Iraqi fighting to free “his country” of “hostile occupiers”.