Twenty terror fatalities per day in world’s newest “democracy,” while Bushites dance in the streets

According to Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal speaking on a PBS panel discussion Friday evening, twenty Iraqis die on average every day from terrorist attacks. (In fact, 36 more Iraqis were killed by terrorists on Friday and 12 more on Saturday, making an average of 24 deaths over the two-day period. Correction: by Sunday, Saturday’s death toll was up to 55, making an average of 45 deaths per day over the two-day period.) Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the thought occurred to me that Iraq might turn into the West Bank. But Israel, with all the terror it has endured, has never undergone anything approaching the ongoing mass slaughter of civilians in Iraq. Yet, instead of considering this unceasing carnage unbearable and intolerable, the Bushites are dancing in the streets, they’re kissing their hands, they’re singing in joy, about Bush’s marvelous “success” in Iraq and the “exhilaration” of freedom. Does our normalization of daily mass terror murder represent the ultimate defining down of deviancy? And if we normalize terror in Iraq, how soon will it be before we normalize it here?

And get this. One of the boys at The Corner, Tim Graham, decries as a sign of liberal media bias the fact that the media highlight each day’s mass killings in Iraq. So, we toppled Iraq’s former regime (which I supported), we made Iraq’s reconstruction and democratization our transcendent national aim (without first defeating the enemy or creating a monopoly of force for the new government there, which I’ve been criticizing for a year and a half), and Graham resents the fact that daily mass terrorist murders in Iraq are daily front page news. Gets in the way of the high-fiving, I guess.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 19, 2005 11:00 AM | Send