How Many Suicide Bombers Have There Been Since “Mission Completed”?

This is a question I would love to have an answer for. I’ve been googling for days but no one seems to be keeping track. Heck, even the statistics on U.S. dead is kind of iffy — it all depends on if you were killed right there in active combat but not in an ambush or en route to a battle and if you were a legal U.S. citizen and not a foreigner recruited to serve in the U.S. armed forces in exchange for your citizenship; suicides and those who die of their injuries en route to or at the hospital are not counted either apparently. (One of my co-workers who served in the marines insists that the government wouldn’t play with the numbers like that.)

What I started out to look for was the number of terrorist attacks/bombings a year in the Middle East before and after the invasion of Iraq. I had read somewhere that the number had risen since Bush called the war over. Supposedly someone in the Bush administration had claimed that we were making the Middle East a safer place.

But what I’m curious about is if the number is just up in Iraq or if it is everywhere in the Middle East.

There seems to be multiple bombings everyday now and no one seems to be keeping a record. I think most Americans would be shocked about the tallied if anyone could get ahold of that information. Heck, I bet even I’d be shocked.

Tags: Suicide Bombers, Middle East

Another day, another bombing

Where’s the website crying out against the terrorists who sent a suicide bomber to kill 27 people, mostly children getting free candy from American soldiers, in Iraq this morning?

And really, what was the suicide bomber trying to accomplish? I really wish someone would explain the minds of the terrorists to me. I don’t understand how attacking Iraqis, particularly children, will help their cause or get them more support.

OK I don’t understand war at all, but I really don’t understand the murdering of noncombatants.

Tags: Suicide Bombers, Terrorists, American soldiers, Iraq

It’s not O.K. Anywhere

Yesterday, on one of the message boards I frequent, we were talking about the website We’re Not Afraid and someone commented that it’s a shame that there isn’t the same sort of outpouring of concern and dismay and rage over the same sorts of bombings that happen everyday in Iraq, Afghanistan and all over the Middle East.

The truth is that those who live in the Middle East live with almost daily bombings and assassinations and the like and those “incidents” are merely blurbs on the evening news, slipped into the days events with the Sports scores and weather updates. Every day, I hear about another bomb and more dead but no one seems to be making a big deal about those bombings and attacks.

But attack the UK, Spain, or NYC and suddenly it’s a crisis of monumental proportion.

And, yes, I understand that those things aren’t supposed to happen here and that’s why everyone is up in arms, but why is it o.k. that they’re happening there?

Why is it o.k. that it’s happening anywhere?

Tags: Middle East, Suicide Bombers, Terrorists, terrorism

This Will Never End

I really want to say something enlightening and intelligent about what is happening with the bombings in London this morning, but I just can’t. I’m just stunned and overwhelmed and swimming in that strange surreal sea of confusion, just as I was on that September 11th. It all seems so unreal and yet I can’t deny it happening. It’s like something out of an action thriller and any moment Keanu or Arnold or Vin Deisel is going to appear and save the day…and yet, there aren’t heroes like that in the real world. The real heroes are the rescue workers, the medical folks in the field and hospitals, the troops, the police, the every day people who helped strangers despite their own fears and injuries. It’s not like the movies. There is no happily ever after right before the credits. London and the rest of the world will have to deal with the aftermath for a long time to come.

And the saddest part is that I think that this will never end. There will always be some group or another that wants to wage a holy war against someone or some country or some ideology or whatever. You can’t wipe this sort of thing out. The War on Terrorism isn’t like any war we’ve fought. There’s no capital to storm, no country to embargo, no real cities to drop bombs on. These fanatics have infiltrated everywhere and every one we kill or capture is a martyr and a recruitment tool.

Iraq has become the ultimate training ground for terrorists because of us. We opened the borders to them. We made ourselves targets. We killed innocent men, women, and children and left relatives and friends with vendettas. We made this mess and we should take responsibility. We have to stop lying to ourselves. The world is not a safer place because of anything we’ve done since 9-11. If anything, we’ve made it worse by fueling the fire and giving them reasons to justify their hatred of us.

This is never going to end. There’s not going to be an action hero to save the day for us before the credits roll.

Tags: London bombing, Suicide Bombers, Terrorists, terrorism

Is the world really safer?

It’s so discouraging to hear the same story every monring on the radio — “X number of marines/soldiers/Americans dead after car/suicide bombing in Iraq.” It’s the same story every morning, but it’s not really. Every morning, it’s a different bomb and different victims. What a tragedy.

And this is where our American focus seems to be. We are so focused on Iraq and our own trials that we regulate the suffering of other countries to the back pages of the papers and the 20 second blurbs before the weekend weather report. God forbid, our desire for a sunny weekend filled with barbeques be interrupted with too much news about how the rest of the world is faring in the war against terrorism.

I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Henninger’s editorial from the OpinionJournal — in fact, I’m not really sure what he’s trying convince us of or what the solution is to the things he dredges up, but it certainly brings up some interesting facts and observations about the American POV:

According to the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (established after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing), there have been about 8,300 terrorist bombings in the world the past 10 years. They have killed more than 10,000 human beings and injured–often appallingly, one assumes–some 43,000 people. (There are separate tallies for arson, kidnapping, hijacking, etc. September 11 is listed as an “unconventional attack.”)

Before September 11 happened in the United States, and ever since, factions with grievances have been blowing up unprotected people going about the act of daily life–shopping, praying, taking their children to school, laughing with friends, burying the dead–all over the world. Places where the sudden cloudbursts of blood don’t always merit our front pages include Spain, Colombia, Israel, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Russia, Afghanistan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt and elsewhere.

Living in the U.S., one could make the cold-blooded calculation that 21,000 dead and 55,000 injured from all terrorist acts over 10 years is a drop in the bucket and that the war in Iraq has mainly increased the rate of death. This may be true. But if as many suicide bombs went off in Manhattan as have gone off in Israel, Manhattanites would have demanded martial law and the summary execution of suspects on street corners. Their greatest goal in life would not be, as it is now, the closing of interrogation rooms on Guantanamo but instead the erasure of terrorists hiding across the East River.

The death march of homicidal zombies in Iraq is trying to push us toward accepting the idea that acts of unrestrained violence against other human beings is now a normal part of politics. It is not normal. Any civilized person should want to resist the normalization of civilian killing as a political act–whether in Iraq, Spain, Indonesia or Kashmir.

Tags: Suicide Bombers, Iraq, terrorism