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War is an ugly business.  It’s even uglier when it entails bean counting, that “macabre calculus” whereby we compute acceptable levels of collateral damage and civilian casualties before “taking out” a target.  In American military practice, this calculus is always in play, because we are an ethical people concerned about loss of innocent lives.  Of course, we haven’t yet learned the ethics of avoiding armed struggle altogether, except as a last resort.

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YouTube video The Terrorist and the Ticket by ColJimQ

The recent news about a convert to Islam in the UK who blew part of his face off in a botched suicide bombing at a family restaurant is just another in a series of incidents involving would-be jihadists who are more a danger to themselves than to others. I am reminded of the film clip of Zarqawi handing off his malfunctioning rifle to one of his lackeys, who promptly burned himself taking hold of the red-hot muzzle. On video-sharing services across cyberspace, one can view scores of short films featuring inept jihadists burning, shooting, squishing, and exploding themselves before they can carry out their terrible intentions. Almost a year ago now, the “doctor jihad” was crowned by two determined suicide bombers crashing their flaming Jeep Cherokee into the front of the Glasgow airport, injuring no one but themselves, and just a few months ago we were treated to a dual bungling in Afghanistan, where one suicidal nut ball incinerated himself putting on his explosives vest, and then a couple days later, another one blew himself up when he tripped down some stairs on his way to rendezvous with six dozen virgins.

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Last year I published a post titled “SOP for ROP” on my old blog. I am re-posting it here since the topic of the essay is once again in the news today with the story from Iraq about an eight- year-old girl being rigged with explosives and remote- detonated by the usual insurgents in order to assassinate an Iraqi commander. I’ve read lots of comments around the Internet about the story, and it’s pretty obvious to me that most folks are completely unaware how common this specific atrocity is in jihadi practice. Even Robert Spencer, who has covered this sort of thing numerous times and whom I in fact quote in the original post, saw today’s news as rather extraordinary. He started his coverage off by stating, “The lovers of death achieve a new low.”

But it’s really just the same old low we’ve seen time and again. The occasion for the original post was the remote detonation in Baghdad of what were reported at the time to be two developmentally disabled Iraqi women. I took the title from a comment by Hugh Fitzgerald on the Jihad Watch story at that time.

Photo by Max Novikov.

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Today’s news about US missile strikes against a suspected terrorist hideout in Somalia is short on details but rich in quality of imagination. Take this quote from the article, for example:

“When we came out we found our neighbor’s house completely obliterated as if no house existed here,” Fatuma Abdullahi told The Associated Press. “We are taking shelter under trees. Three planes were flying over our heads.”

This report comes, of course, on the heels of the usual claims of the obligatory child victims:

Residents and police in Dobley said at least eight people, including four children, were seriously injured when a home was destroyed. [Read more →]