Ranting to /dev/null

Sounds like a good plan to me.

Why would Al Qaeda care if you killed Iraqi insurgents??? They're not connected at all.

For the most part, the "insurgents" are Iraqis who believe they are fighting an occupying army they didn't ask for. As I understand it, they weren't terrorists before the war started.

You're wrong about both of your points. First of all, Al Qaeda cares deeply about Iraq, as Britain's involvement there was named as reason for this morning's attacks in the claim of responsibility. Al Qaeda wants the restoration of the caliphate, and views all of the Middle East as holy ground. Bin Laden's primary reason for hating the Saudis was that they allowed US troops on their soil and that those troops were used against Iraq. Get with it.

Second, the "insurgents" are increasingly Saudis, Syrians, and Iranians who are fighting their jihad. A lot of them are probably al Qaeda fighters.

"Why would Al Qaeda care if you killed Iraqi insurgents?" Is this a serious question?

Try reading your own New York Times editorial page - Thomas Friedman, for example.

Yes...it was a serious question, and I have no problem admitting that I could be misinformed about some things. (Hence my saying "As I understand it...")

It may well be true that Al Qaeda ops are moving into Iraq to join the fight against the US troops, but I was thinking specifically of people like the Iraqi Olympic Soccer player who said, during the Olympics in Athens, that his brother was back home resisting the invading US Army, and that he wished he could be as well.

While there are terrorists in the mix, many of these "insurgents" aren't fighting a jihad......they believe their homeland has been invaded by an unwelcome army, and are doing the same thing you would if, say, Mexican tanks were rolling down your street.

Besides the fact that, simply put, revenge only gives way to more revenge.

"Aren't fighting a jihad"? Are you kidding me? Have you read anything but Kos for the past 18 months?

Read this. I always thought peaceniks were naive, but this really takes the cake.

I have no idea what Kos is....and I'm not a "peacenik." Like I said, I was referring to a specific guy, and while he may be the only one who had been just a regular Iraqi that had a problem with his country being invaded, I doubt it.

Part of the problem with invading a country without a plan for what happens afterwards is that you leave a power vacuum. I'm sure that there are dozens of different "insurgent" groups who all have their own ideas of what they'd like post-Saddam Iraq to look like.

But whether or not the insurgents are all members of Al Qaeda or not, the real issue here is whether a hundred fold revenge massacre is the proper response for a country that claims to hold the moral high ground.

I want to add, though, that I am incredibly angry about the bombing this morning, and whoever is behind it needs to be brought to swift justice.

That doesn't mean that everyone who is connected to whoever is behind it needs to be killed without trial, though.

Actually, I think a hundred for one really is the correct response in this case. There are plenty of car-bombers in Iraq, so killing a hundred of them for every Western civilian casualty sounds about right. And this isn't a "massacre", it's killing combatants who have taken up arms against us and their own civilians. This would be the best kind of moral high-ground possible: you kill one of our innocents, we kill one hundred of your aggressors. Sounds like a balanced equation to me.

are you all kidding me? what do you mean "get them back and start killing insurgents.." what do you mean 'start' - you don't have to be a peacenik to recognize that all of our aggression simply fuels their passions. the opposite response is not appropriate either. its fun to hang out way over here and play armchair vigilante. But seriously guys.

Oh, I'm serious. And if that means killing a lot of people, that's what that means. The time for measured response is gone. We need overwhelming, crushing, counted out in multiples of damage done. "Fuel their passions" it may, but that just means we need to keep at it. Their passions are not sparked by our aggression but theirs. The solution is to kill them.

Randy Newman's song "Political Science" is great.

"Blessed are the bloodthirsty revenge seekers."

II Ry. 3:23

This isn't really about revenge for me. It's about winning. Because losing this fight isn't something we can afford to do. And the only way to win seems to be to kill a lot of people. Calling me nasty names may make some feel better, but doesn't really point out any flaws in my thinking.

man Ryan, I'm not even in passionate agreement with you or anything, but geez. I suppose that's what you get for using inflammatory language, I guess I just expected more out of some *cough* nat *cough* people when it comes to discourse.