Soldiers face real 'die-in' daily in Iraq

It's a shame that I'm here in Iraq with the Marines right now and not back at Ohio University completing my senior year and joining in blissful ignorance with the enlightened, war-seasoned protesters who participated in the recent "die-in" at College Gate. It would appear that all the action is back home, but why don't we make sure? That's right, this is an open invitation for you to cut your hair, take a shower, get in shape and come on over! If Michael Moore can shave and lose enough weight to fit into a pair of camouflage utilities, then he can come too!

Make sure you all say your goodbyes to your loved ones though, because you won't be seeing them for at least the next nine months. You need to get here quick because I don't want you to miss a thing. You missed last month's discovery of a basement full of suicide vests from the former regime (I'm sure Saddam's henchmen just wore them because they were trendy though). You weren't here for the opening of a brand new school we built either. You might also notice women exercising their new freedom of walking to the market unaccompanied by their husbands.

There is a man here, we just call him al-Zarqawi, but we think he'd be delighted to sit down and give you some advice on how you can further disrespect the victims of Sept. 11 and the 1,600 of America's bravest who have laid down their lives for a safer world. Of course he'll still call you "infidel" but since you already agree that there is no real evil in the world, I see no reason for you to be afraid. Besides, didn't you say that radical Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance?

I'm warning you though -it's not going to be all fun and games over here. You might have bad dreams for the next several nights after you zip up the body bag over a friend's disfigured face. I know you think that nothing, even a world free of terror for one's children, is worth dying for, but bear with me here. We're going to live in conditions you've never dreamt about. You should get here soon though, because the temperatures are going to be over 130 degrees very soon and we will be carrying full combat loads (we're still going to work though). When it's all over, I promise you can go back to your coffee houses and preach about social justice and peace while you continue to live outside of reality.

If you decide to decline my offer, then at least you should sleep well tonight knowing that men wearing black facemasks and carrying AK-47s yelling "Allahu Akbar" over here are proud of you and are forever indebted to you for advancing their cause of terror. While you ponder this, I'll get back to the real "die-in" over here. I don't mind.

-Marc Fencil, a senior majoring in political science, criminology and Spanish, is currently serving in Iraq. Send him an e-mail at marc.g.fencil.1@ohiou.edu.

"There is a man here, we just call him al-Zarqawi,"

Wait a minute. I don't recall that guy being a problem until after we conquered Iraq. Is it possible our conquest caused us additional problems?

" but we think he'd be delighted to sit down and give you some advice on how you can further disrespect the victims of Sept. 11"

Ah yes. So anyone who opposes our conquest of Iraq is disrespecting the victims of Sept. 11? I thought it had been established that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

" and the 1,600 of America's bravest who have laid down their lives for a safer world. "

So now that we have started the war in Iraq, the world is safer? Safer from what? Is anyone still buying that WMD thing?

"I know you think that nothing, even a world free of terror for one's children,"

Well, if a poor fellow laying his life on the line in Iraq wants to believe he's keeping the world free from terror for his children, I guess he is entitled to that idea.

"Die-in" at College Gate... Fitting that they should hold this "die in" being that they are the cause of the people dying in this war. February of 2003 Saddam offered to step down, but they chose to embolden him after which he denied he wanted to step down. Matter of fact it was the day after that "record breaking protest" in Urine-ope that he told the UN inspectors to go f- themselves. All these liberals involved in emboldening that mutt, as far as I`m concerned every drop of blood spilled over there from that day forth till now is on their hands. We were talking about the pride of ONE asshole as compared to the peace and freedom of millons, and they chose to side with the asshole. Screw them all. Hell has reserved a special place for scum like them and still to this day they have the gall to pull crap like this.

This is a sober reply to your three assertions in #6

Assertion 1)Al Zarqawi was not a problem until we invaded Iraq.
Answer: The dozens of countries in the middle east that are essentially tribal dictatorships with compulsory religious practices produce many terrorist organizations. There have been thousands of terrorists in all of these countries who have existed for decades to kill the infidels who are threatening their way of life (their tribal dictatorships with enforced religion) by trying to convert these countries into modern democracies with guaranteed constitutional freedoms. When Iraq was taken over by the US led military alliance, it focused many of the terrorists activities there including this AlZarqawi character. He existed as a terrorist BEFORE the invasion of Iraq and he is NO more dangerous now than he was then. There is a much greater chance now that he will be killed along with the thousands of his jihadist buddies who died before him at the hands of the US military.

Assertion 2) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11
Answer: All proponents and facilitators of terrorism are assumed to be desirous of killing innocent civilians and that includes the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. It would be foolish to say "this group of terrorists we can leave alone because they aren't the ones who carried out 9/11" They're terrorists and they have vowed to Allah to kill as many infidels as possible and they can't be ignored or negotiated with. Killing them where they are training with their assault weapons and bomb vests is the only way to stop them.

Assertion 3) The world was safe enough from Iraq before we took over because there were no WMDs
Answer: Saddam Hussein had and used WMDs many times. The deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi and Iranian civilians was caused by chemical weapons used by Saddam Hussein as deliberate genocide against ethnics he wanted dead. There are 300,000 corpses dug up from mass graves all filled in by Saddam Hussein and there are likely to be nearly a million total deaths. I hope you don't think that as long as you and your friends here are safe from this genocide that murdering a million people is all right. Here is a link to see a few of the corpses that were filling up the Iraqi countryside year after year until the United States military put a stop to it. The citizens of Iraq (and Afghanistan) are free now because of people like this marine who authored the above note.

http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/pdf/iraq_mass_graves.pdf

"Saddam Hussein had and used WMDs many times."

Yes, and you get one guess as to who gave him those WMD's.

" The deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi and Iranian civilians was caused by chemical weapons used by Saddam Hussein as deliberate genocide against ethnics he wanted dead."

Sounds like you have been listening to too much war propaganda. Here is something else for you to read:
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/a_war_crime_or_an_act_of_war.htm

EXERPT: Check the link for the full story.
A War Crime or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere
New York Times | Opinion

Friday 31 January 2003

MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.

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