Progress in Iraq

On the ground in Fallujah, we've found one of the insurgency's major weapons caches and command centers. There was a short time when it appeared we had found sarin gas (labeled in German and Russian, no less), but it turns out to be a sarin gas test kit. This isn't exactly a smoking gun. On the other hand, the main reason for carrying a sarin gas test kit is because you expect to encounter sarin gas, and there's little reason for anyone to believe the U.S. would be using sarin. While the terrorists and their outposts are being cleaned up in Fallujah, Iraqi forces invaded a mosque in Baghdad, backed by U.S. Troops. Note the order of the wording - Iraqi forces invaded, U.S. Troops supported. I point this out because headlines like "U.S., Iraqi Troops Storm Baghdad Mosque" might give you the opposite impression. That link also has a good summary of the reasons for going into the mosque. Powerline has a letter from one of their readers detailing the response from local Iraqiis:

I just got of the phone with my father in Baghdad. I asked him what is the reaction of the Marine killing the injured Iraqi in the Mosque in Felujah. His first words were "Good riddance." People are not giving it a second thought. Any terrorist who attacks soldiers from Mosques has no sanctuary. Any terrorists who fake death to kill in a mosque deserve no mercy. He says Iraqis (including Sunnis) are fed up with the terrorists and want them eliminated... Please spread the message, let America Know that the Iraqis are with us, grateful and want us to stay strong and get stronger so that we can all defeat terrorism.

An update to this same story on Powerline references an op-ed piece at the Washington Times, defending the infamous video of a Marine shooting an injured combatant inside the mosque in Baghdad.

What I'm getting at, in this land of free speech and home of brave Marines, is my unequivocal belief that Marine X committed no "war crimes" in that fortified Fallujah mosque last week where he shot and killed a prone and wounded terrorist. He was just doing his job — his hellishly dangerous job — and thank God for him... "Enlightened" people everywhere are clucking — but not over the heinous execution of CARE's Margaret Hassan, the mutilated bodies found on Fallujah's streets, the beheading chamber discovered by U.S. soldiers, the Taliban-like decrees threatening death for Fallujah women who don't "cover," or the bomb-making workshops seized before creating more craters of carnage. They emote over the death of a terrorist dedicated to all of the above... "In a combat infantry soldier's training, he is always taught that his enemy is at his most dangerous when he is severely wounded," commented Charles Heyman, a senior analyst with Jane's Consultancy Group in Britain. And the jihadist enemy we find in Iraq — comrade in both faith and arms with the terrorists of Beslan, Bali, Jerusalem, Madrid, and Manhattan — are even more dangerous wounded than others. Some are rigged with suicide-belts to detonate in extremis. Boobytrapped corpses — a Judeo-Christian taboo Muslim jihadists overcome, I suspect, in their perverse belief that killing infidels on earth earns them virgins in paradise — are a common hazard in hotspots. Even one of our beheaded hostages in June, poor devil, was packed with explosives designed to detonate at an American soldier's touch. Who, among the global millions who have watched NBC's videotaped-shooting, realize that a comrade of the Marine in question was killed by a booby-trapped corpse the day before? That same corpse-bomb wounded five others in the unit. And who, among those same millions, realize that even as Marine X, NBC's global anti-hero, was shooting the enemy he suspected was playing possum, just a block away, another explosive-rigged corpse was killing another young Marine? In that split second of fear and indecision, our guy made the right call...

I think the point about a wounded enemy applies double here. Not only was the combatant wounded, but the organization he stands for is being dealt some mortal blows. It seems that whenever the media report our troops are actually, like, killing people, there's a mad rush of people who rush in complaining that we aren't following the Geneva Convention. This is pure hogwash. The Geneva Convention only applies to those countries -- countries mind you -- who sign on to it. Last I checked, neither al Qaeda nor the insurgents in Fallujah are a country. Furthermore, the articles of the Third Geneva Convention which are so often used as argument all refer to the treatment of prisoners after capture. No guarantees of humanitarianism are afforded those who are still fighting. Call me a Hawk, but in my mind disabling or killing enemy combatants is absolutely on-task to fighting a war. In this scenario, Marine X felt threatened, and had recent and frequent experience with other wounded or dead posing a serious and immediate threat to his well being. Make no mistake, we are winning the war. The eyewitness reports show that our soldiers get it, the Iraqi people get it, the insurgency gets it. Only our own press doesn't get it. Oh, and the French, of course.

French President Jacques Chirac says he is "not at all sure" the world has become safer with the removal from power of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. In a BBC interview, Mr Chirac suggested the situation in Iraq had helped to prompt an increase in terrorism. President Chirac also maintained that any intervention in Iraq should have been through the United Nations. "To a certain extent, Saddam Hussein's departure was a positive thing," Mr Chirac said when asked if the world was safer now, as US President George W Bush has repeatedly stated. "But it also provoked reactions, such as the mobilisation in a number of countries, of men and women of Islam, which has made the world more dangerous," he added.

"There's no doubt that there has been an increase in terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the situation in Iraq. "I'm not at all sure that one can say that the world is safer."

I just don't see how replacing throughly trained and indoctrinated terrorists with new green ones makes us less safe. Even a devout Muslim would require some amount of indoctrination to have the determination to blow themselves up, I would think. If there was no need for training, why did al Qaeda have so many training camps? On the other hand, if killing the terrorists in Iraq draws the already-present-but-waiting-for-orders terrorists from other countries in to join the fight, then our efforts in Iraq are working to make those other countries safer as well.