To believe Dumya and co, all these
Iraqi insurgents are non-Iraqis coming in over the border or ex-
Hussein flunkies. This is bull. If you take the
POW population in
American custody as a good sample of the force we are fighting against (and if it isn't, why are they POWs?), then you must acknowledge that foreign insurgents are a very small percentage of the force. In addition, a significant portion of POWs are from
tribes and organizations that were anti-Hussein during his rule. This rules out the "
Saddam flunkies" argument.
And what about all the suicide bombers? To simply dismiss them as dying for the 72 degrees of female they will encounter in the afterlife is myopic. They are killing themselves for more reasons than imaginary tail in the hereafter.
They are also willing to die to kill Americans because we destroyed their house and killed their children, or took their son in the middle of the night and never told them what happened to him, or one of the many other incidents of "collateral damage" we have generated in this ill-conceived and poorly-executed war. How many more Iraqis must die before we have satisfied our blood lust from 9/11? They have lost over 10,000 civilians in this terrible catastrophe, and the toll continues to mount. I know that many of my fellow Manhattanites are against the war. It is only the panderering fearmongers of 9/11 that keep probing our wounds to keep them open for their own profit.
The suicide bombers will always have ready volunteers as long as we are acting unilaterally in Iraq. Only by sharing (really sharing, not letting others pick up the bill while we do as we please) the responsibility for developing Iraq and laying out a timetable for complete withdrawal so the Iraqi people actually believe in their potential to become a self-governed democracy will we succeed.