Kim Sun II, who was killed today by his terrorist captors in Iraq, was, the Post reports:

an evangelical Christian who had majored in Arabic, English and theology with university scholarships. [Kim] was working as a translator for a private South Korean contractor providing clothes and food to the U.S. military in Iraq, hoping to save enough money to fulfill his dream of becoming a missionary, his family said. "How could it have come to this?" a distraught neighbor, in tears, shouted at reporters as she consoled Kim's parents. "How can we have faith in the world anymore?"

Seeing this news and the grim picture of his parents one feels the same. But it also makes one angry. Kim's terrorist captors are reportedly associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist the Bush administration failed to kill when it got the chance almost two years ago. Why has the Bush administration been so ineffective at targeting the real terrorists now flourishing in Iraq, since the war?

The facts speak for themselves. Iraq was not cooperating with al Qaeda or its offshoots like Zarqawi in a serious way before the war, certainly not to the degree that members of the Saudi and Pakistani security and intelligence services were. Zarqawi of course was mostly operating in northern Iraq, in terroritory under the control of the US no fly zone - a fact the Bush administration would like us not to remember. By any reading of the news, Iraq today must certainly rank the world HQ for Islamist radical terrorists, and is certainly one of the most insecure places in the world, a misery for its citizenry and foreign occupiers alike.

The State Department's radically revised numbers in its re-released Patterns of Global Terrorism report for the year 2003 make it impossible to show how much terrorism increased in Iraq itself in the year the US invaded and conducted a disatrous post-war turned-back-into-a-war. [And, ridiculously to my mind, the State Department keeps post-invasion Iraq in the list of "state sponsors of terrorism," even as Iraq by May 2003 was under US-led occupation and (incompetent, insecure) administration. Nevertheless, the graph here, of the Total International Attacks by Region, 1998-2003, shows the spike in the number of incidents of terrorism in the Middle East overall in the past five years. And do note that the State Department does not count attacks that wound and kill military personnel, including bombings of buildings and vehicles that kill US troops, for instance, reports of which we hear nearly daily from Iraq, as incidents of terror.

[Many thx to KD for explaining how to post graphics, and to DL for formatting suggestions.]

Posted by Laura at June 22, 2004 04:37 PM