Thursday, June 15, 2006

Why the outrage?

The new Iraqi government today announced that it would consider granting amnesty to the so-called terrorists that had American blood on their hands. Then there's a flurry of denouncements saying they didn't mean to say it and/or it was taken wrong etc. I don't get the outrage here.

This is a war, as we are consistently reminded by the President. We were not invited to Iraq, but we're the most powerful nation in the world and we went anyway. Some people in Iraq didn't like this. Namely a bunch of Sunni Arabs that used to be the boss. I can see why they're pissed, but it is as impossible to conceive of the pissed off Iraqis forming a regular army and putting up a fight against mighty America as it is to think that Colonial America could field a regular army and defeat the most powerful country in the world. Certain situations require adjustment of tactics.

As I've said several times before, blowing up Humvees with remotely detonated bombs is warfighting...not terrorism. Sometimes civilians get killed, just like they did when we dropped two atomic bombs or fire-bombed Dresden, but if the target is military I can't see this as terrorism. Beheading journalists or killing Iraqis for buying mayonnaise is terrorism. So when has there even been a war in which the warfighters were permanently imprisoned? Of course they should get amnesty if they didn't commit war crimes.

Did we not allow imprisoned Vietnamese or Japanese or Germans to go back to their families? But this war will never have a Battleship Missouri moment, you say? What was to keep the Japanese, who had been suicide bombing American ships, from suicide bombing MacArthur's interim government in Tokyo?

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