The Pendragon's Hall

In October of 2001, MIT professor Noam Chomsky made the none-too-original charge that the attacks of September 11th were the fault of the West. "For the first time," he crowed, "the gun is pointed the other way," and went on to say the West deserved it because of imperialism (I'd say we got cheated--we gave the non-West civilization and they gave us terrorism. What a deal!). I notice nobody has thus far said it about the remnants of Saddam Hussein's guards. Here, truly, for the first time, the gun is pointed the other way. Do the Republican Guards deserve this shameful treatment? Oh, many times over. This is not, by the way, me condoning it. In Christian circles we know it is not always good to get what we deserve. (The ones I truly pity are the Americans and Brits who fall into the hands of the Iraqis after this. Not that the treatment they get will differ from what they would have gotten at the hands of these brutes anyway. But now in the West people will think they got what they deserve.) Nevertheless, if you want to talk about crimes deserving of horrible deaths--the Iraqi Republican Guard deserved what they got far more than the victims of 9/11 (who had not participated in imperialism or harmed anyone in an Islamic country). I do not condone these acts of barbarism done to the Republican Guards--the perpetrators should be punished for giving the coalition a bad name. But the loony libs should stop making political hay with it--neither Bush nor Rumsfeld ordered this and it does not reflect the actions of most coalition soldiers. In fact, most of the soldiers, although this has been glossed over in the major media outlets, have behaved with remarkable restraint, even rescuing the guards who ambushed them from burning buildings and holding their fire under intense pressure. If the actions of Muslim terrorists is not indicative of Islam as a whole, which to me is an improbable claim, then neither should 200,000 American troops be slandered for the actions of a few dozen at most. Get the issue in perspective.