[extropy-chat] Re: Iraq and legality again

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Dirk Bruere <dirk at neopax.com> wrote:

> Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> >Most insurgents are not Iraqis.
> >  
> >
> http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/20050327_316.html
> March 27, 2005
> "Speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in Mosul, Iraq, Army Gen. John
> Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, said most of the
> insurgents in the country are Iraqis,"
> 
> So, where are you getting your 'facts'? Fox news?
> Here's a challenge for you - give us the official % of foreign
> fighters in the Iraqi resistance according to prominent US sources eg
> political, military etc

Sorry, I go by what the troops on the ground say. The ones that fight
against US troops and are currently participating in negotiations with
the US and Iraqi leaders to rejoin the political process are Iraqis.
Those who car bomb Iraqis and kill Iraqi cops and soldiers are
foreigners.

While high level people on all sides tend to pin the number of foreign
insurgents at 5% of all insurgents, a number primarily promoted by Red
Crescent and Michael Moore, over 150 live foreigner insurgents have
been captured to date. This number is contradicted by others claiming
that 91% are foreigners:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1419250/posts
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/47795.htm

WHOSE INSURGENCY? 

By MARK GOLDBLATT 
   
June 7, 2005 -- ACCORDING to the SITE Institute, a respected
counter-terrorism organization, only 9 percent of suicide bombings
sponsored in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are conducted by native
Iraqis. 
Analyzing data from a "martyrs" list posted on a Zarqawi Web site, SITE
found that 42 percent of the killers hailed from Saudi Arabia, 12
percent from Syria, 11 percent from Kuwait, with the rest from an
assortment of Asian and European nations. 

Why does it matter? 

Because it gives lie to the suggestion, often heard on the left, that
the struggle in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror. The
antiwar crowd insists that American soldiers are now engaged in a
guerilla war with militant Iraqis — Michael Moore has compared them to
the Minutemen of our own Revolutionary War. Except now it turns out
that fully 91 percent of suicide bombers are foreigners crossing into
Iraq with the purpose of killing civilians. 

In short, terrorists. 

American soldiers are not fighting an Iraqi insurgency. They're
fighting a terrorist insurgency. If not for jihadi nutcases pouring
across its borders, Iraq would be well on its way to a stable and
peaceful democracy. 

It's high time that truth sunk in.   

E-mail: Mgold57 at aol.com 


This is concurred by libertarian Thomas Sowell.

42% are from Saudi Arabia, which has a vested interest in keeping oil
prices up with Iraqi instability. It appears that the left-wing claim
of a 5% foreign insurgent population is a fake number drawn from
counting any Iraqi civilian who owns a gun as being "an insurgent", as
if gun ownership automatically makes one a terrorist. By faking all
Iraqi gun owners as 'insurgents', one is able to make the precent of
insurgents who are foreigners seem small by comparison.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4252

Looking Back 
by Thomas Sowell  (June 6, 2005)

Summary: What will our descendants think of us -- will they ever
forgive us -- for leaving them in such a desperate situation because we
were paralyzed by a desire to placate "world opinion"?  

 [www.CapMag.com] 

We may look back on some eras as heroic -- that of the founding fathers
or "the greatest generation" that fought World War II -- but some eras
we look back on in disbelief at the utter stupidity with which people
ruined their economies or blundered into wars in which every country
involved ended up worse off than before.

How will people a century from now look back on our era? 

Fortunately, most of us will be long gone by then, so we will be spared
the embarrassment of seeing ourselves judged.

What will future generations say about how we behaved when confronted
by international terrorist organizations that have repeatedly
demonstrated their cut-throat ruthlessness and now had the prospect of
getting nuclear weapons from rogue nations like Iran and North Korea?

What will future generations think when they see the front pages of our
leading newspapers repeatedly preoccupied with whether we are treating
captured cut-throats nicely enough? What will they think when they see
the Geneva Convention invoked to protect people who are excluded from
protection by the Geneva Convention?

During World War II, German soldiers who were captured not wearing the
uniform of their own army were simply lined up against a wall and shot
dead by American troops.

This was not a scandal. Far from being covered up by the military,
movies were taken of the executions and have since been shown on the
History Channel. We understood then that the Geneva Convention
protected people who obeyed the Geneva Convention, not those who didn't
-- as terrorists today certainly do not.

What will those who look back on these times think when they see that
the American Civil Liberties Union, and others who have made excuses
for all sorts of criminals, were pushing for the prosecution of our own
troops for life-and-death decisions they had a split second to make in
the heat of combat?

The frivolous demands made on our military -- that they protect museums
while fighting for their lives, that they tiptoe around mosques from
which people are shooting at them -- betray an irresponsibility made
worse by ingratitude toward men who have put their lives on the line to
protect us.

It is impossible to fight a war without heroism. Yet can you name a
single American military hero acclaimed by the media for an act of
courage in combat? Such courage is systematically ignored by most of
the media.

If American troops kill a hundred terrorists in battle and lose ten of
their own men doing it, the only headline will be: "Ten More Americans
Killed in Iraq Today."

Those in the media who have carped at the military for years, and have
repeatedly opposed military spending, are now claiming to be "honoring"
our military by making a big production out of publishing the names of
all those killed in Iraq. Will future generations see through this
hypocrisy -- and wonder why we did not?

What will the generations of the future say if we allow Iran and North
Korea to develop nuclear weapons, which are then turned over to
terrorists who can begin to annihilate American cities?

Our descendants will wonder how we could have let this happen, when we
had the power to destroy any nation posing such a threat. Knowing that
we had the power, they would have to wonder why we did not have the
will -- and why it was so obvious that we did not.

Nothing will more painfully reveal the irresponsible frivolity of our
times than the many demands in the media and in politics that we act
only with the approval of the United Nations and after winning over
"world opinion."

How long this will take and what our enemies will be doing in the
meantime while we are going through these futile exercises is something
that gets very little attention.

Do you remember Osama bin Laden warning us, on the eve of last year's
elections, that he would retaliate against those parts of the United
States that voted for Bush? The United States is not Spain, so we
disregarded his threats.

But what of future generations, after international terrorists get
nuclear weapons? And what will our descendants think of us -- will they
ever forgive us -- for leaving them in such a desperate situation
because we were paralyzed by a desire to placate "world opinion"?



Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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