Insurgency Insanity

Fire of Liberty
While the various newspaper and TV' news programs continue to point out that the "insurgents" are increasing their attacks or that their gaining strength, Christopher Hitchens has offered his beef with these news outlets calling the horrific actor "insurgents." Hitchens notes in this article over at Slate that the people initiating and carrying out these missions of death are not some type of grassroots revolutionaries but are actual Ba'athist, Bin Ladenists and jihadists (Aside from Ba'athist, the other two are from other nations). As long as the press continues to peg these people as insurgents they will basically undermine the government of Iraq and do a disservice to the prideful and brave people of Iraq who face death everyday while trying to form a democracy.

If you can't find time to read Hitchens' wonderful piece, just read this brief sample:

A letter from Zarqawi to Bin Laden more than a year ago, intercepted by Kurdish intelligence and since then well-authenticated, spoke of Shiism as a repulsive heresy and the ignition of a Sunni-Shiite civil war as the best and easiest way to thwart the Crusader-Zionist coalition. The actions since then have precisely followed the design, but the design has been forgotten by the journal of record. The Bin Laden and Zarqawi organizations, and their co-thinkers in other countries, have gone to great pains to announce, on several occasions, that they will win because they love death, while their enemies are so soft and degenerate that they prefer life. Are we supposed to think that they were just boasting when they said this? Their actions demonstrate it every day, and there are burned-out school buses and clinics and hospitals to prove it, as well as mosques (the incineration of which one might think to be a better subject for Islamic protest than a possibly desecrated Quran, in a prison where every inmate is automatically issued with one.)

Then we might find a little space for the small question of democracy. The Baath Party's opinion of this can be easily gauged, not just from its record in power but from the rancid prose of its founding fascist fathers. As for the Bin Ladenists, they have taken extraordinary pains to say, through the direct statements of Osama and of Zarqawi, that democracy is a vile heresy, a Greek fabrication, and a source of profanity. For the last several weeks, however, the Times has been opining every day that the latest hysterical murder campaign is a result of the time it has taken the newly elected Iraqi Assembly to come up with a representative government. The corollary of this mush-headed coverage must be that, if a more representative government were available in these terrible conditions (conditions supplied by the gangsters themselves), the homicide and sabotage would thereby decline. Is there a serious person in the known world who can be brought to believe such self-evident rubbish?

Good ole Hitch does it again. Bravo!!!