Poemranker [Replying] Wed May 08 02:43:50 PDT 2024

Replying to a comment on:

How to make a suicide bomber (Free verse) by Caducus

If I invaded your city told you how to live, who to worship spat on your brothers would you fight back? If I punished you Without proof By starving your children And shooting your people Would you accept it? If I went on television Shook the hand which strangled you The hand with a wedding ring that killed your pregnant wife would you honour her memory by doing nothing? If it were me And you destroyed my identity, Killed my brothers Criticized my God Labelled me a terrorist Decimated my way of life, Then maybe in my maddening I would strap a bomb to my chest Walk in to Starbucks And blow myself to smithereens. To be tomorrows news After the silicone model On page 4 labelled scum With no reason to say why I did it.

-=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.

14-Mar-05/4:22 AM

You dullard. If you had been following the news carefully, you'd realise that the overwhelming majority of the victims of suicide attacks in Iraq have been Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security forces, not Westerners. In Iraq, the enemy's strategy is clearly one of deliberately targeting the Iraqi people to instil fear. They want to sabotage the political process, because they know democracy will not give them the power they crave. Why? Because they represent a tiny minority of the population. Many of them are former baathists, fundamentalists who want to establish a totalitarian theocracy, and foreign scallywags like the Jordanian Zarqawi. In other words, people with a lot to lose in a free democracy, and a lot to gain from another vicious dictatorship. I won't deny some of these insurgents are ordinary young men in the wrong place at the wrong time, deluded by spiritual leaders, anti-western propaganda, and their own pride into fighting an occupation, but when they target fellow Iraqis one tends to lose sympathy.

And what are the ingredients of the average suicide bomber? Has there been a single Middle Eastern suicide bomber who wasn't utterly seeped in a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam? Or whose propaganda did not originate under a totalitarian regime? How many free democracies do you know that sponsor terrorist training camps and regularly churn out suicide bombers from among their own people? Are they motivated by an urge to combat western oppression, or do they want to spend an eternity in paradise shagging virgins? Perhaps we should capitulate to such people, or at most contain them. There's no doubt that many have died as a consequence of the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan; the real question is whether or not such a conflict was avoidable in the long term. Don't forget that people were dying there everyday, and would have continued to suffer under those regimes if we had merely contained them. And when those regimes collapsed, what then? Is the environment in a failed rogue state such that ordinary people have a decent chance of establishing a representative government, free from bloodshed? Or does power inevitably fall to the most vicious, most ruthless, most power-hungry sadist in the region? Are We back at square one, with a body count that continues to rise unbeaked?

âDemocracy begins at home,â they say. And I think that's true, in the sense that the majority have to want democracy before it can work. When more than 8 million Iraqis (about 59% of the population) turned out to vote, despite consistent threats from YOUR NOBLE SUICIDE BOMBERS that they would target polling stations, I think their commitment to democracy cannot be in doubt. Would any of that have been possible without military intervention? Iraq may yet go tits-up, and there can be little doubt we've made mastakes there, but if I know one thing for sure, it's that things aren't as simple as the default "AMERICA = NAUGHTY" dumpling you so lazily embrace :(

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