Friday, March 18, 2005
"A Kervorkian"
It was BIG. 4000 lbs. of explosives makes a big bang, and a big hole. This one killed the suicide bomber, a few private security guards, and wounded one of our guys. Luckily, it was a "John Kerry" wound. He was just scratched up by some shrapnel.
Heh. Brutal, but funny.
The Major writes about serious matters with a wry sense of humor. He discusses the practice of "assisted suicide" bombings:
The dirty little secret of the Islamo-fascists is that many of these car bombs are not the suicide sacrifice that they tell of in their recruiting propaganda. All too frequently, the driver of many of these vehicles is unaware that he is doing anything more than smuggling supplies through a checkpoint or planting a car bomb for later detonation. These murderers are often driving not far behind the VBIED with a remote control detonation device. The bomb is detonated as soon as the vehicle gets close enough to the target, or, as in many cases, the device is about to be discovered and the mission compromised at a checkpoint. The checkpoint becomes a target of opportunity, no matter how many innocents are there. We refer to this as a Kervorkian, or an assisted suicide bombing. It is loathsome.
Occasionally you run across even a Westerner who has puzzled through the pathology of jihad and decided that there must be some justice to their cause if people are willing to kill themselves to advance it. This has always been a ridiculous argument -- the Japanese who charged American machine gun nests with swords or who flew their planes into American ships did not validate the morality of Imperial Japan -- but now its factual underpinnings are collapsing as well. Most of these bombers in Iraq and Palestine were overtly brainwashed (how often are suicide bombers experienced middle-aged people?), but now we are learning that some of them are actually deceived.
2 Comments:
By 
Sluggo, at
Fri Mar 18, 11:24:00 AM:
It's was a constant theme with Arafat -- "Of course our cause is just. Look at all of our children who have martyred themselves." It's not all that surprising that some westerners find this logic persuasive. If they feel something deeply and passionately it must be true. Sacrificing your children is the ultimate test of conviction. Someone should remind them that God stayed Abraham's hand. Get them a sheep.
By fester, at
Sun Mar 20, 03:26:00 PM:
Just looking at this from the risk assessment point of view, I have a little bit of doubt about this as a comomn tactic for if the insurgents develop a reputation as being more than willing to blow up their supply drivers without their permission or knowledge, the supply of people who are willing to be typical supply route drivers/intel supporters etc. will dramatically shrink, thus isolating the insurgents from what had been their previous natural base of support.
