Vindicating Chris Kyle
Islamic State proves the late
sniper was right about the ‘savage’ enemy.
‘Savage, despicable evil. That’s
what we were fighting in Iraq.” Those were among the words the late Chris Kyle,
of “American Sniper” fame, used to describe the enemy he and fellow veterans of
the Iraq war faced. After seeing images this week of Islamic State jihadists
murdering a caged Jordanian pilot by burning him alive, can there be any real
doubt that Kyle was right?
We say this as a corner of liberal
America has fallen over itself denouncing Clint Eastwood ’s blockbuster biopic
of Kyle, who was killed in 2013 by a deranged Marine veteran. HBO’s Bill Maher
called him a “psychopath patriot,” and other Hollywood action heroes like Michael Moore have weighed in similarly. Their
view is that Kyle must have been inhumane since he killed scores of enemy
fighters without being burdened by a guilty conscience.
Yet the kind of butchery that
Islamic State likes to advertise via YouTube was the reality Iraqis routinely
faced when the Islamic State’s forbear, al Qaeda in Iraq, terrorized entire
cities and towns during the height of the Iraq war. “An Egyptian hostage was
taken out of the trunk of one of the cars, dressed only in his undergarments,
his entire body black and blue from beatings,” wrote Jean-Charles Brisard and
Damien Martinez about the methods of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of
al Qaeda in Iraq who was killed by the U.S. in 2006.
The account of this killing—one of
thousands carried out by AQI—continues this way: “The kidnappers then tied the
Egyptian’s hands behind his back and asked him to state his name. . . . After
complying, he was about to apologize for his acts, but a man gave a sign to the
‘executioner’ standing behind the hostage, who grabbed the man’s tongue and cut
it off, stating that the time for excuses was past.” The man was then beheaded.
It was on such executioners that
Chris Kyle trained his sights. Messrs. Maher and Moore may want to hold up the
Iraq war as evidence of American perfidy, but as the atrocities of Islamic
State are again reminding us, the moral balance in that war was exactly the
opposite. No wonder millions of Americans admire Kyle and are flocking to see
the movie that treats him like a patriot in full.
From
the Wall Street Journal
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