Lawrence Kaplan Capitulates to Terrorism Yet Again

The Horror..., the Horror!!!

Lawrence Kaplan responds to the latest atrocity out of Iraq -- a report, not broadcast by CNN, that a young girl had been beheaded and a dog's head sewn in its place. [here]

His reaction! Shock and horror, of course. Any sane person would feel those. But he then throws up his hands yet again and concludes that these Muslims are so mad that they cannot be dealt with and that the US must therefore wash its hands of the whole Iraq enterprise.

on the question of sectarian rage, America is now largely beside the point. True, U.S. troops can be--and have been--a vital buffer between Iraq's warring sects. But they cannot reprogram their coarsened and brittle cultures. Even if America had arrived in Iraq with a detailed post-war plan, twice the number of troops, and all the counterinsurgency expertise in the world, my guess is that we would have found ourselves in exactly the same spot.

His advice -- these are really, really bad guys, and we can't handle the horror -- retreat, retreat!

Of course it never occurrs to him that his reaction is precisely what the terrorists were trying to provoke all along and that horrific acts that trouble the imagination are very much a part of a terror campaign. This is not sectarian rage so much as it is terrorism. The bad guys are calculating that, if they just escalate the horror enough, we will follow the advice of men like Kaplan.

Faugh!

Terror must be fought with every resource we have. We cannot retreat in the face of it for, as 9/11 showed, people like Mr. Kaplan can run, but they cannot hide.

Mohammed at Iraq the Model explains for dullards like Mr. Kaplan that this is not really a sectarian conflict:

Anyway, I do not consider the recent wave of violence as sectarian violence even though it assumed a sectarian shape…both terrorists/insurgents and outlaw militias are concerned about their existence more than about defeating their sectarian counterparts, therefore each party uses the existence of the other as pretext for its own activity. Our friend Shalash the Iraqi put it eloquently in one of his posts just a week ago:

There will be no excuse for the Mehdi army to exist if terror groups ceased to exist and there will be no excuse for the terrorists to exist when the Sadr gangs and rats of Badr drop their weapons. one depends on the other...
Whenever the government tries to disarm the militias, the terrorists would come to attack at the strongholds of the militias to give them reason to exist and whenever the government tries to attack terrorist strongholds the militias would take to the streets to distract the government and drag its forces into side battles…

Read it here.

And Captain Ed explains just why these sub-human monsters do what they do:

They try to suck all of our will to resist them by creating horrible images for us, taunting us with their cruelty and sadism. While we blather about whether Gitmo detainees might be bummed out with their three hots and a cot, Islamofascists butcher people for the fun of it. They do so because they want us to believe that we cannot beat them -- that they are so evil that we cannot hope to compete with them.

Read it here.

Apparently this sort of strategy works..., with hyper-sensitive people like Lawrence Kaplan.