Scripps Howard News Service August 10, 2005
A different kind of weapon of mass destruction lives on
By Mike Harden
We have found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But the WMDs, it turns out, are IEDs.
Not nukes or nerve gas, the weapons of choice are various types of bombs the military has labeled "improvised explosive devices."
In the absence of contrary information from defense officials, it appears that the blast last week that killed 14 Marines serving with an Ohio-based Reserve unit was caused by yet another IED. The Ansar al-Sunnah Army, which claimed responsibility for the attack, identified it as an IED employing two bombs.
It is not that Iraq wants for more-conventional tools of death. When the war began in 2003, the Web site GlobalSecurity.org contends, more than 10 million mines already had been sewn on Iraqi soil.
It is the IEDs, however, that Army officials concede are responsible for up to 80 percent of U.S. combat deaths. During a 12-month period that ended in June, the Associated Press reported that car bombers hit Iraq 479 times.
For all of our smart bombs, lasers and sophisticated weapons systems, we seem to be able to do little to stop the mounting toll taken by an enemy that can wreak havoc and death with the crudest of explosives detonated by garage-door openers, pagers or toy-car remotes.
This we must consider as the nation joins Ohio in mourning its lost sons.
This we are driven to ponder as we ask where this war is headed and for how long.
The terrorists, it seems, are not likely to run out of explosives, cars or humans willing to become cannon fodder in exchange for a quick trip to heaven.
In the city of Mosul, taxis are now required to have their trunk lids removed because so many of them were being used as rolling bombs.
Earlier this year, a headless corpse was booby-trapped.
We have yet to witness the full scope of the enemy's diabolical inventiveness and adaptability.
With terrorists coming to Iraq from all over, we must, at last, ask if the most critical factor in gauging the long-term numerical strength of our enemy is, quite simply, the birthrate of Muslims.
Suicide bombers don't sign up for their missions to learn a trade, get a college education or make the world a safer place. Fanaticism thrives because self-preservation _ the most basic of human instincts _ has been snuffed out that madness might flourish.
My heart hurts today for every mother, father, spouse and child of the Marines killed last week. In one week's time, almost a millennium of unlived lives has vanished.
To those who lost loved ones last week, a whole new definition for mass destruction was revealed when their doorbells rang. The light of hope went dark in even the remotest reaches of their souls.
We have been in Iraq long enough to know the terms by which this war must now be fought. And we have, as the death toll mounts, located the WMDs to which President Bush alluded.
They take longer than a nuclear warhead to kill thousands. But the killing gets done all the same, and the enemy's stockpile of weapons seems to be without end.
To prosecute, then, a war without a clear exit strategy is to make ourselves of one mind with suicide bombers.
© Copyright 2005, Scripps Howard News Service
