The savage barbarity of the daily violence in Iraq is a constant offense to all right-thinking people. But yesterday three crimes took place that define very clearly the moral vacuum in which the killers are operating.
In Basra a suicide bomber walked into a retirement home and killed an old woman and injured three others. Also in Basra a gunman entered a school and shot a teacher dead in front of his pupils. And finally in Baghdad, a third member of Saddam Hussein’s defense team was murdered.
These three outrageous acts strike at the very basis of decency. To seek to slay elderly people, wise in years who had done their duty to society, to stain the life-long memories of innocent children with the cold-blooded assassination of the man whose job was to equip them with hope for their futures and to strike down a lawyer who had bravely dedicated himself to the judicial process were blows at the very foundations of civilized society.
Men that seek to advance any cause by such appalling savagery, soil not just themselves but the cause itself. There were rumors that the Al-Qaeda leadership in Iraq had come to recognize that Zarqawi’s pitiless brand of carnage was generating intense revulsion and draining away the last vestiges of sympathy among former supporters. It probably suited the Americans to hint that Zarqawi’s whereabouts were betrayed by someone from among the Al-Qaeda leadership when it is more likely that they traced the terror leader through a mobile telephone signal. Had it been true about Zarqawi’s brutality, it might have been expected that the new leader Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir would have switched tactics. Instead the manic bloodletting continues with no sign of change.
And this slaughter is indeed manic as the murder of Saddam’s lawyer, Khamis Al-Obaidi, demonstrates. Taken from his home — which he had refused to flee — by men wearing police uniforms, the brave man’s body was dumped on the edge of a Shiite area in the capital. This suggests that he may have been seized by Shiite militias. But it could equally be Al-Qaeda thugs bent on doing everything possible to destabilize the Iraqi state or Baathist insurgents seeking to implicate Shiites in the assassination. Therein is the madness.
As nobody knows who kills whom, this terrible bloodbath becomes devoid of any scintilla of meaning. It exists purely for itself. Those who cause yet more blood to flow into the tragic Iraqi cauldron of misery can only be dedicated to violence for the sake of violence itself.
Such individuals deserve nothing but utter contempt. Whatever cause they pretend to represent, it can in no way justify their atrocities. Those who oppose the presence of the American-led coalition as an occupying power do not shorten the occupation by a single minute when they blow apart old women, gun down teachers or assassinate lawyers. Indeed as long as the violence continues, the stronger will be Washington’s justification for remaining in Iraq.
