No Stupid Jokes Today. No, Really.

I've just got to get something off my chest today. I've been paying a bit more attention to the news in Iraq lately. To be specific, the kidnapping and beheading of Korean Kim Sun-il is what interests me. The whole thing has just got me mad. Mad at the cowards who decided killing this man is their ticket to heaven, and quite frankly, mad at the Korean public who thinks their government ought to to have kowtowed to these a-holes.

Now I have plenty of grief for this fellow. He was there to do a job, and I read that in fact that he had dreams of being a Christian missionary in Iraq. My heart goes out to him and his family, and I'm in no position to tell them how they ought to feel about the whole thing. But every one of their fellow countrymen ought to be condemning the murderers, not the South Korean leadership. They ought to be cheering on the troops who are going in there, hopefully to bring some of these bastards to justice.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of the people who was all gung-ho about the US invading Iraq the way it did. I think the invasion was completely screwed up, not because they didn't succeed militarily, which they did, but because the US completely failed to gain the confidence of a sufficent number of allies to make sure the occupation would be adequately manned, which it isn't. It didn't help that they pretty much flipped the finger at the rest of the world, and then went in under pretenses that no one else was buying. Smart. Real smart. Politics 101... not even.

But now the fact is Saddam's gone, and the Iraqi people need help dealing with the brainless low-lifes who've sprung up among them, gotten their tentacles on machine guns and camcorders, and decided it's ok to kill people who're just doing their jobs. I have absolutely no confidence in the character of people who will do this sort of thing, and leaving them alone with their countrymen is *not* going to result in a stable, happy Iraq. A lot of Iraqis are dying now because the White House was all too eager to prove a point. How many more Iraqis are going to die or live a life of fear and oppression just so the rest of the world can tell Bush that "We told you so?".