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News and Views About the United States
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Your Most Trusted Source of Foreign
News and Views About the United States
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September 2, 2005
EDITORIAL
Original Article (English)
IRAQIS have been plunged into despair and anguish the likes of which they have never experienced before. Screaming or wailing, tearful or solemn, they gathered in their thousands on Wednesday to hold mass funerals for the nearly 1,000 Shiite pilgrims, mostly women and children, who were killed in a horrifying stampede on a Baghdad bridge.
Terror has struck them down. Terror from the fear of terrorism. Terror from a mortar strike at a nearby mosque earlier Wednesday. Terror over the possible presence of a suicide bomber in their midst.
They were felled by a rumor, the newest weapon in the terrorist arsenal that has now proven far deadlier than any attack with a gun or a suicide bomber.
The terrorist, Interior Minister Bayan Baker Solagh told state-owned Iraqia TV, pointed a finger at another person and said that he was carrying explosives ... and that led to a panic. All it takes now is for the terrorist to lift a finger, and this could happen all over again in every population feeling a similar paranoia.
Some days ago, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was asked at a press conference whether
Elsewhere, President Bush, besieged by
questions over Cindy Sheehan and her anti-war supporters, countered as usual
by pressing his post 9/11 panic button, arguing that a pullout from
Spreading fear has been Bush’s chosen mode
of defense against critics of his global war on terrorism. No doubt this tactic
has served him well, even burying the fact that Saddam Hussein’s
But Bush must stop spreading fear now, because the constituency of fear he nurtures at home could well be turned against him.
All it takes is for the terrorist to lift a finger.
