Define Conservatives vs. Liberals

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Daniel Henninger Has to Distort to Make his Point 

Mr. Henninger's editorial seems to be suggesting that ALL terrorism will eventually be prevented if we stay the course in Iraq. He goes as far as loosely insinuating that all terrorism factions around the world receive their marching orders from Baghdad.

Has Mr. Henniger missed the news that the war in Iraq was justified based on manufacturered evidence? Does Mr. Henniger still believe that Iraq has connections to 9/11? How could someone writing for such a reputable newspaper come to such conclusions?

Terrorism is Everyman:

If we removed our troops from Iraq, the terror would not stop. But the U.S. news of innocent civilians blown up in Iraq would move to the unread round-up columns. Then, in a way, the phenomenon of terror would indeed shrink--to this:

December 2004: A powerful explosion ripped through a market packed with Christmas shoppers in the southern Philippines yesterday, killing at least 15 people and injuring 58.

Notice the lumping of terrorist events in Indonesia and Spain with Iraq. Two of these things are NOT like the other. Two have ties to Al Queda, and one does not. One of these events is draining our economy, getting our soldiers killed, and does so without justification. That is Iraq:

No matter how fat the diet of stories about Iraq suicide bombings or Gitmo shoved down our throats and no matter how many distraught opinion-poll results come back up, no serious person can allow post-9/11 American security to be reduced to that.

The death march of homicidal zombies in Iraq is trying to push us toward accepting the idea that acts of unrestrained violence against other human beings is now a normal part of politics. It is not normal. Any civilized person should want to resist the normalization of civilian killing as a political act--whether in Iraq, Spain, Indonesia or Kashmir.