As you know, I've consistently opposed the American-led aggression against Iraq. Many other anti-war folks have gone out of their way to either praise or rationalize the insurgency. I've been careful not to do that. While attacks on occupying soldiers may be a legitimate tactic of war, the many insurgent attacks on civilians are not.
While some insurgents are surely Iraqis who object to their homeland being under foreign domination, many are from outside the country. As such, their primary motive is not the well-being of the Iraqi people or nation, but inflicting maximum carnage on the outsiders... whatever the 'collateral damage.'
Some have even compared the insurgents to the American revolutionaries; the old 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter' line. But to my knowledge, American revolutionaries never launched homicide bombings that killed children... their own side's children.
But that's exactly what Iraqi insurgents did yesterday. Or perhaps I should say, insurgents in Iraq. Because it seems to me that real Iraqi patriots wouldn't have murdered Iraqi kids.
A dozen of the dead were 13 or younger. The children's crimes?
Accepting candy and toys from US soldiers.
I remember hearing a statistic some time ago (unfortunately I can't remember where) that went like this. In World War I, about 90% of casualties were soldiers; a figure that was typical for wars of that time. In today's wars, about 90% of the deaths and injuries are to civilians. Perhaps that's why I don't advocate war quite so flippantly and casually as some people.
But it also shows how civilians, who were once accidental victims of war, are being increasingly targeted by belligerents.
I may have opposed the aggression just like the insurgents, but I'll be damned if I'm associated with them. I'll be damned if I'm an apologist for homicide bombings against children.
I think launching an unprovoked, belligerent war that will inevitably cost countless civilian lives is utterly immoral, regardless of what pseudo-justification is used. However, as reprehensible as the casual and flip manner which more than a few pro-war types advocated this destructive aggression may have been, the intentional slaughter of civilians is on a different order of magnitude altogether.
Aggressive war is abhorrent and I will continue to oppose it. But I just can't make the moral equivalency that what the coalition forces are doing is no different than the insurgents are doing. We were wrong to invade and conquer Iraq. Our standard of behavior shouldn't be defined down to what the bad guys do. But I have no compulsions against saying that intentionally massacring kids is worse. If that makes me an 'apologist for imperialism' or some other nonsense, then so be it. But I'm pro-human rights more than I am anti-Bush.
Simply put, freedom fighters don't murder pre-teenage kids who are eating candy. And no person with any shred of human decency can say otherwise.
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