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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend....
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To: Sully- who wrote (2260)5/26/2004 4:56:51 PM
From: Sully-   of 35834
 
the laws of war are not designed to be a one-sided suicide pact

SNIPERS IN THE MOSQUE

NY Post Editorials

American troops fighting in Kufa on Sunday found a large weapons cache in the city's Salah mosque. It included two mortar tubes, a machine gun, 12 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 200 mortar rounds.
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It wasn't the first time that followers of the renegade Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have desecrated a mosque by using it for military purposes. His Mahdi army has exploited the holy Shiite shrines in Karbala, Najaf and Kufa to build secure bases and otherwise operate with impunity in those cities.

Under the Geneva Convention and other laws of war, places of worship — like hospitals and other sanctuaries — lose all protected status if they are used as military facilities.<font size=3>

That's right: Put snipers in a minaret or store your RPGs in a mosque and you transform it instantly into a legitimate military target.

That's because the laws of war are not designed to be a one-sided suicide pact.

Or designed to put regular armies deployed by Western democracies at an acute disadvantage when confronted by enemies who respect no law whatsoever.

And that makes it all the more important that American forces be remorseless when it comes to attacking and destroying sites and vehicles that are being used in violation of those laws.
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Letting insurgents and terrorists use a mosque as an arsenal or a fortress by continuing to treat it as sacrosanct only encourages them to do the same thing elsewhere and at greater cost.

Furthermore, the U.S. government officials who speak for the Coalition in Iraq should be equally determined and forthright when confronted by those who claim — out of ignorance or malice — that U.S. troops have no right to defend themselves from forces willing to exploit their legal and humanitarian restraint.

During the fighting in Fallujah last month, Sunni insurgents attacking U.S. Marines followed the example of Palestinians on the West Bank by using ambulances to ferry troops and weapons. After initially being fooled by this cynical gambit, the Marines subsequently fired on such ambulances. They were savagely criticized for doing so by the foreign media, the United Nations and so on — and Coalition spokesmen failed to make a forceful defense of their actions.

That was a propaganda victory for the enemy.

There will be more such propaganda victories if Coalition forces, and those who speak for them, don't respond with ruthless determination every time terrorists break the laws of war.<font size=3>

nypost.com
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