On Anniversary Of Beirut Bombing, WaPo Blames Bush

The Washington Post sure has a strange way to honor the dead.

Acknowledging (in the very last line!) that the State Department will hold a ceremony this morning marking the anniversary of Beirut Marine barracks suicide bombing that killed 241, causing the largest loss of American military life in a single incident since the Battle of Iwo Jima, reporter Robin Wright tees off on an America-blaming piece on suicide bombing, not a piece that honors the fallen.

The piece quotes a study by Mohammed Hafez of the Naval Postgraduate School showing a big increase in suicide bombing as a tool in the new warfare.

The unpublished data show that since 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China, and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs.

Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years. The sources who provided the data to The Washington Post asked that they not be identified because of the sensitivity of the tallies.

The data show more than 920 suicide bombings in Iraq and more than 260 in Afghanistan, including some that killed scores of U.S. troops. All occurred after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

Of course, the Left knows who is to blame for all this. Rising Hegemon sums up their position with a question, "Is there nothing the Bush Administration cannot do?"

Always good for an off-base inanity, Juan Cole goes academic (i.e., too intellectual to be smart) on us:

542 [attacks] out of 658 is about 83% [in Afghanistan and Iraq], lending further testimony to Chicago Political Scientist Robert Pape's theory that suicide bombings tend to occur in countries under foreign military occupation by an otherwise democratic government. (That is, they are staged for the public in the occupying country to some extent; people tend not to bother to blow themselves up when occupied by a dictatorship.)

My gosh. Can't these people see something idiotic for what it is? This is the most a$$-backwards thinking I've seen since ... well, probably since whatever leftist dribble I was reading yesterday.

It's hard to tell by Cole's garbled structure whether Pape is referring to Iraq's democratic government or America's, but the fact is there would be no democratic government in Iraq were it not for us. We are not occupying; we have a fraction of the troops in Iraq or Afghanistan required by an occupation, and we are encouraging the strengthening of the Iraqi government, not controlling it.

And "people tend not to bother to blow themselves up when occupied by a dictatorship?" Did it not occur to these two academic muddle-heads that "occupied by a dictatorship" does not describe pre-war Iraq? "Controlled with an iron fist by a 100% Iraqi dictatorship" does. There's no occupation now, there was no occupation under Saddam. What is this ridiculous fixation with a word they can't even define?

As quoted by WaPo, you would never know that the study deals almost exclusively with Islamist bombing. Nothing is said about the rise of Islamist terror, preceding Iraq and Afghanistan.

No context is given from the Palestinian use of suicide bombs in their war on terror against Israel, even though they and the Tamil Tigers pretty much invented the suicide technology. No effort is made to explain the bombings in Algiers or China within the context of Iraq and Afghanistan.

And worse, there is no mention that there's a war going on. When there's a war, both sides need weapons or one side will summarily win. We have plenty of weapons that are capable of trouncing any conventional weapons the Islamists can raise against us, so they utilize a weapon that we have difficulty deterring: suicide bombs.

If there were weapon parity, suicide bombing would not be used; AK 47s, RPGs and other conventional weapons would be used by both sides.

So here's the story WaPo didn't write:

Islam has been actively at war against democracy since the 1980s and they have found that there most effective tactic is terror and their most effective weapon is the suicide bomber. These bombers -- recruited from the dregs of society and doped up before they're sent off -- are effectively keeping the war going, killing thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of our troops in the process.

Is the enemy, then, George Bush or Islamist warriors? For all but the intellectually befuddled and Bush-deranged, the answer is obvious.