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Treating Iraqi lives as means toward our end—and our lives as a means toward the Moslems’ end
Almost every day, the poor Iraqis endure another suicide attack that blows up 25 or more people and maims scores more. Just the other day a fiend drove a car bomb into a crowd of children receiving candy from American soldiers. So how must the Iraqis feel seeing the world make such a big deal over 50 Londoners being killed? Fifty Iraqis are killed every couple of days, and it’s barely news. President Bush’s mantra, “we fight the terrorists in Iraq in order not to have to fight them here,” turns the entire Iraqi population into cannon fodder for the supposed sake of U.S. national defense. I wonder how they feel about that. Just after writing the above, I saw a front page story in today’s New York Times reporting that between August 2004 and May 2005 an average of 800 Iraqi civilians and police have been murdered by the terror insurgents each month. I had come up with the “25 killings or more per day” figure out of my head, as an approximation based on my impressions of the day to day news from Iraq. Twenty-five times 31 is 775, almost the exact figure reported by the Times as the monthly toll in Iraq. Further, when we consider that Iraq’s population is about half that of Britain’s, we realize that the Iraqis lose the same percentage of their population every day to terrorists that the British lost in the London bombings.
Our relative indifference to the ongoing carnage in Iraq may seem like a sign of insensitivity toward a distant people about whom we know little. In fact, it shows our own terrible vulnerability. As a friend of mine has been saying for a year, our easy acceptance of the almost daily terror killings in Iraq, as the price of “freedom” as well as of our own supposed defense interests, suggests that when and if terror killings become common in our own country, we will accept that too as the price of “freedom”—by which we will actually mean the freedom of millions of Moslems to immigrate into our country and live here among us. Indeed, as my discussion of Fareed Zakaria indicates, some influential thinkers are already telling us that “low-level” terror attacks in this country are something we should accept. This routinization of horror is a direct result of our involvement with Moslems and the Moslem world. The only way to get out of the bottomless, nightmarish trap in which we are placing ourselves is to disengage from Moslems and the Moslem world, as I have argued over and over. I am not speaking of “isolationism.” My proposal is not that we isolate ourselves, but that we contain and isolate the Moslems. Email entry |