Friday, April 30, 2004

 
Tortured Logic

Gotta' admit that I didn't see the abuse of Iraqi prisoners coming in spite of my brilliant predictions that our leaders would not have the intelligence or will to deal effectively with acts of "resistance" by out-of-uniform agents. Too few of those Iraqis who are not our enemies have risked death by exposing those war criminals. Given that Iraqis seem, at least, to have suffered relatively few casualties in their roadside and road bound bombing campaign and that the number of Baathists guilty of crimes against humanity or Iraqis or "foreign fighters" apprehended after the end of "major hostilities"[who have been executed by us-edit] is zero[or close to zero-edit], and given the murder or "execution" of coalition forces and those employed or friendly to them, it should not have been surprising that prisoners in our custody have been subjected to treatment that violates -well- *our* norms. It is obscene that thousands of prisoners have not already been given sentences of death. And hundreds of those sentences should have been carried out after the murder of the contractors.
But what's the use? The above is unthinkable to most of our elite, although one suspects that such actions would be supported by most Americans.
And the above is not as important as "our" refusal to even consider strategies which *maximize* civilian deaths in populations which support attacks on our civilians.
There are those who believe that we are so -what-? chivalrous? good? that we should not even threaten megadeath war and that we are so powerful that we need not do so. And there are those(many of whom are on the domestic Left) who believe that the West is so evil that its civilian population is not worthy of defense. Count me as someone who is coming to believe that a West which does not fight for its existence does not deserve to exist.