If you have any doubt about who the bad guys are in the Iraq War--which is a different question than "Should we be there?"--then just ask yourself which side deceives mentally retarded women into blowing themselves up in a public market? I'll give you a hint: it's not the United States.

Michael Ledeen has an interesting post at the Corner about this in which he says,

But I am always left with the basic question: how come no terrorist leader blows himself up? All those advocates of glorious martyrdom, they go right on giving speeches and drawing salaries, they don't, uh, give an example of how to do it.

Isn't that essentially the chickenhawk argument?

WHY IRAQ?
So how does all this, or the humble attempt at a history lesson of my last column, justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way). - Jonah Goldberg, 2002

Unfathomably evil. I am truly shocked, and that is the first time in a long time I can say that about something coming out of the Middle East.

This is genuinely one of the most sinister atrocities I have ever heard of. I think Americans (including myself) have became tragically desensitized to quite a bit during this turbulent decade.. but this is simply awful and honestly quite heartbreaking.

Dan, I don't see any rational point that you're trying to make here. Bombing innocent civilians is wrong, obviously. But would it have been morally preferable for those two women to merely be hit and killed by the bombs rather than used as the bombs? (Assuming it kills the same number of innocents and the terrorists still don't sacrifice their own lives)

All I can say is, it's a really stupid move on the part of the perpetrators. Since they made these women an important detail of the story, they will be mentioned specifically in news articles and humanized rather than lumped into a number, creating more outrage against the bombers than there otherwise would be.

hey obi, if they really beleive there are 75 virgins waiting, what are they waiting for? hell Bin and the boys are some ugly dudes, you would think they would be first in line lol. just shows they aint go the balls to do it. easier to get retards to do it.

Tricking the mentally disabled into suicide certainly adds a new distinction to the terrorists' already burgeoning list. Yes, it adds up to just more dead disabled people, but in context it means they are willing to go that immoral extra mile in order to murder.

I read a piece this morning about a man and his family in India who belong to the lowest of the low caste Dalit (the unclean). They attemped to educate themselves and worked hard to earn enough money to be as upwardly mobile as possible. For their efforts, a Mother and two daughters were raped and murdered.

I'm not sure why people in this country can't understand that it's a completely different world out there that what we're used to.

That's why Americans who apply American rules, laws and logic to obscure foreign events are not living in the real world and shouldn't continue to be surprised that their values aren't reflected.