Reading Ralph Peter's latest, there's one thing about Iraqis that I still can't understand:
YESTERDAY, 80 terrorists in police uniforms raided an Iraqi research institute in Baghdad, rounded up 100-plus male students, loaded them into vehicles in broad daylight and drove away.
They couldn't have pulled it off without the complicity of key elements within the Iraqi security services and the government: "our guys."
The students probably will be executed and dumped somewhere. Partly for the crime of wanting to study and build a future, but primarily just to step up the level of terror yet again.
There is more than enough evidence that if you are kidnapped in Iraq these days that you are going to end up dead, and probably tortured first. Given that, why are these folks so passive about their abduction and near certain death seemingly day after day? The closest analogy I can come up with here in the US is how the folks on Flight 97 took it upon themselves to fight back, and that lesson only took a couple of hours to sink in.
If Iraqi's are so going to be so damn passive in the face of people they know are going to kill them, then even I am beginning to think that we should leave. We cannot ultimately gaurantee their safety, only they can. I know they need a lot of help, but damn, have some pride, some courage, and enough gumption to give yourself a chance and if necessary go out fighting rather than with your hands and feet bound to make your killer's job as easy as possible.
Do one hundred young men facing a dozen or so men with guns stand much of a chance. Not really, but it is better than the chance they'll have once they have all been tied up and all their killers then will need is a large knife and a video camera. It may be a little hoary, but the oft cited question of what would have happened if every Jew in the Warsaw ghetto had fought back against the Nazis rather than calmly accepted their fate seems appropriate here.
A little Fabrizio Quattrocchi would go a long way against these lethal bullies.