This toe stomping was treated as a stunning revelation of American brutality. It was added to the torrent of hysteria about photos of nude Iraqis piling on each other and a nude Iraqi being led by a woman soldier with a leash. All of this --according to the media and some in Congress --is supposed to show that America is itself a terrorist nation and that we are really no different from the terrorists.
This is dangerous nonsense.
Here is what is important. This conflict started because a group of Islamic fundamentalist mass murderers killed three thousand totally innocent civilians on September 11, 2001. We did nothing to provoke it except in the terrorists' crazy brains. We had to fight back. That's why we went into Afghanistan and used harsh methods to get answers out of captured Al Qaeda there. To prevent more 9/11's.
Does the media think you just plunk down your card on a silver tray and the terrorists talk? Do they think we get useful information out of hardened terrorists by polite questioning? What do the media think we did in Vietnam? What do they think the Israelis do to find out about terrorism? What do they think the British did in Northern Ireland? Fighting terrorists is a brutal business.
Now, we're in Iraq. Once we're there, we have to protect innocent life from terrorists. That means interrogating prisoners whom we think are terrorists. Sometimes harshly. But we are the good guys. We saved Iraq from a dictator a billion times worse than anything we do there. The people who murder our soldiers and civilians and mutilate them just because the Americans are trying to help rebuild Iraq--those killers are the bad guys.
The media plays up endlessly fraternity boy mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Yes, it does not look good. And some of it is genuinely bad. The media goes wild about those things. But where is the fuller story? What about the thousands of Iraqis who were tortured to death, who had their eyes cut out, who were surgically mutilated, who were raped, starved, had gasoline poured down their throats and then were set on fire by the Saddam Hussein regime at the same prison? Why don't we ever hear about them? What about the Americans –– military and civilian––who have taken Iraqis mutilated by Saddam and sent them to America for prosthesis for free? Why don't we hear about them on TV?
Why don't we hear more about the families of the four U.S. contractors who were murdered and their bodies mutilated in Falluja by terrorists ? They have been totally forgotten.
Let me ask the media and the Congress a question: might it have been worth stomping on a terrorist's fingers and toes and depriving him of sleep to find out who murdered those four men in Falluja. And making sure they didn't do it again?
Media, Congress, get it straight: The US is the main repository of decency on this earth. And we are a powerful nation. The Al Qaeda can never defeat us if we are united. But we can defeat ourselves if we begin to think we are the enemy and lose our confidence in our cause.
Let's be clear: there is no moral equivalency between us and the terrorists. We're the good guys, and if we lose because we didn't play hard enough, it's the end of everything good in our world.