Thursday, June 08, 2006

The Funny Thing About Dead Terrorists: Windspike's Sure Happy It's Thursday Question du Jour

It occurs to me that many on the reichwing will be in a salubrious mood given the news that an ugly terrorist is dead. But the funny thing about this brand of terrorists, it seems, is that they are like mushrooms: Cut one off at the head and more grow up around it. This leads me to...drum roll

Windspike's Sure Happy It's Thursday Question du Jour
Which one of these sentences in these three paragraphs by the president and his PR Propaganda team is most important? Explain:
Now Zarqawi has met his end, and this violent man will never murder again. Iraqis can be justly proud of their new government and its early steps to improve their security. And Americans can be enormously proud of the men and women of our armed forces, who worked tirelessly with their Iraqi counterparts to track down this brutal terrorist and put him out of business.

The operation against Zarqawi was conducted with courage and professionalism by the finest military in the world. Coalition and Iraqi forces persevered through years of near misses and false leads, and they never gave up. Last night their persistence and determination were rewarded. On behalf of all Americans, I congratulate our troops on this remarkable achievement.

Zarqawi is dead, but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him. We can expect the sectarian violence to continue. Yet the ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders.
I also heard that Rummy was on the podium (audio report on NPR morning edition) touting this as a victory for the ideology of freedom for stopping some one with "the blood of many people" on his hands. And I came up with a secondary question should you choose to answer it:

How much blood is too much blood spilled (GIs, Iraqi civilians, count it how you like)so that a man with so much blood on his hands can end up dead by our hands?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...


On the link, Bush: ''Zarqawi's death is a severe blow to al Qaeda.''

Since we've foresworn the use of chemical weapons (CS gas), we also gave up the prospect of capturing Zarqawi alive. We had to kill him, much like we had to kill Saddam's two sons. One can only guess at the intel lost to political correctness in US war-fighting.

Anonymous said...

Cut one off at the head and more grow up around it.

This was the point I made in my own post. The al Zarqawi situation should be treated as a very cautionary tale. There remains a huge x-factor as to what might happen now.