Power Surge: Force Protection with Extreme Prejudice

Chris Floyd
May. 07, 2008

The picture above shows a two-year-old child killed when American forces fired rockets into a heavily populated area of Baghdad's Sadr City. Pentagon spokesmen said the operation was "force protection;" U.S. forces had come under sniper fire from the neighborhood.

No doubt this is true; when you invade a country for no reason, drive it into ruination, chaos and civil war, then continue to occupy it year after year, why then, sometimes the natives will get restless and fire back at you. In such situations, the best method of "force protection" is not to call in airstrikes and missile attacks on crowded civilian neighborhoods and kill two-year-old children -- but to REMOVE your forces from the invaded land altogether, and stop using them to perpetuate a war crime that has already caused the death of a million innocent people.

Yet the plain, common-sense logic of this proposition continues to elude our military and political leaders -- including the two "progressive" presidential candidates -- and all of the "serious" analysts of public policy as well.

So for years to come, we will continue to see pictures such as the one above -- for which As'ad AbuKhalil, the "Angry Arab," provides an apt caption:

What? This two-year child? Well, he was killed in US bombing on Sadr city but there is evidence that he was one of the commanders of the Mahdi Army.

But here we must disagree with the esteemed professor; surely the child was an Iranian belligerent, a Quds Force officer, committing acts of war against the United States at Tehran's order. Surely now we should put our new "Attack Plan" against Iran into action, before any more of these two-year-old evildoers who hate us for our freedoms can try to destroy our shining city on the hill.