After obliterating part of a Sunday funeral procession the enemy produced his first single-explosion murder count in excess of fifty since the February slaughter of over one hundred in the Iraqi city of Hilla. Good neighbors from the Associated Press swung in to advertise the event, identifying through unknown, possibly clairvoyant means the combusted perpetrator as "Iraqi"; vividly transcribing the red fruits of terrorist malevolence; and then pulling back for a wider, political angle with an aspersion on Baghdad's national government, describing it as having "shut out Sunnis," a grotesque falsehood since Ibrahim al-Jaarafi awarded the Iraqi minority cabinet seats in generous excess of their National Assembly representation.
The Associated Press did not report Iraq's denuciation of the attack as "a crime and a massacre," and in treading superlatives missed two indications of successive failure, drawn from the enemy and his bestial work. When Hilla was attacked on the last day of February, London's Telegraph compiled a list of terrorists' major bombing murders in Iraq from the start of 2004: eight of the seventeen blasts were assaults on civilians while nine were directed at Iraqi security forces and particularly, like the target of today's bombing, recruits. Eliminating the bravest and most physically capable of Iraqis would have seemed a logical objective to terrorists but the enemy miscalculated, perhaps wrongly taking Iraqis for a people complacent from years couched in the libertine safety of free nations and markets, and his animal mind has since precluded any deviation from straight bloodletting. Try as terrorism's collection of Western publicists have, Iraqis quickly separated the terrorist's simplistic intentions from his rhetorical broadsheet and have rejected the imposition of fear, quietly marshalling their state. Ranks of civil and military defenders have grown from literally nothing to tens and hundreds of thousands. Today's butchery, then, should only spur Iraqis on.
How have the terrorists fared? Despite the fixation with capturing single leaders in terrorism's markedly horizontal mass of brute force, the enemy's speech is more helpful when he believes no one will overhear. In an apparently captured letter from one magniloquent thug to the next:
This is the path, but where are the men? We ask God to guide them. What has happened to me [and] my brothers is an unforgivable crime. ...By God, the one and only God, you ask about what happened to us, because you didn't ask about the situation of the immigrants. ...But morale is weakening and there is [exhaustion/confusion] among the ranks of the mujahedeen, and some of the brother emirs are discriminating among them. God does not accept such actions. ...This is my last request: to meet you, because there are many things that are secret and the truth is that I no longer trust any person who says that he is coming from the sheik's side. We are tired and we have suffered a lot.
Where is the glory? The piety? Many suppose the virgins can be reserved for another. General John Abizaid was correct two months ago: terrorists are in perpetual decline, reliant on a media charactization of local disruptions of normalcy as epidemic, increasingly surrounded by a liberal Iraq with the means to preserve itself. One year ago the enemy could congregate by the hundreds and, if unsuccessfully, battle American troops; now he settles for a job queue and white-hot adjectives inked in 12-point font.
Since authoritarianism spans miles, nations and continents a news item from freelance Near East correspondent Jennifer Griffin on the exploitation of a cretinous Palestinian, airing last night on Fox News, is worth examining to chart the course of the region's culture of death. A young man named Turkoumen, primed for murdering Israelis by al-Aqsa gangsters, was pulled off assignment when the roughnecks saw an opportunity to be included in the formation of Mahmoud Abbas' armed street authority. I paraphrase Griffin's voiceover during clips of her "interview" with the would-be killer:
Turkoumen did not appear to think for himself. He barely understood our questions, even in his own tongue. Al-Aqsa members told him what to say.
Griffin's chilling deadpan was offset by footage of Griffin seated to face Turkoumen and his puppeteers. In ducked audio one could hear Griffin address the poor idiot, whereupon he'd turn to his gun-toting comrade for the answer to a yes-or-no question. No, very happy to hold off on the explosive belt, to do what he's told. Angry about Israel. Palestinian state, Yes! Will Turkoumen ever see his shining moment on international television? That he should only be so lucky as maladroits in Iraq, whose greatest punishment might be humiliation and a prison sentence. When the policeman gig is up al-Aqsa will likely turn their monosyllabic human bomb loose and that will be that.
Not all strongmen are simpleminded muscle, of course — bin Laden's squads for the attacks of September 11th were men with all provision but no appliance, stranded by birth in countries promising them lives as nameless, silent accessories to the local dictatorial arrangement. The Allies make war for a reason; in the absence of liberty festers evil. But the hollowness of that evil couldn't be more bared than on a bloody day like today. Meet the footsoldiers of terror, desperate professionals and bridled imbeciles.