No sanctuary

I haven't seen any major news coverage on this development so far but I'll keep looking. The short story is that a group of insurgents in Fallujah holed up inside a mosque, from which they were launching attacks on US Marines. Well the Marines decided they'd had quite enough, thank you, and proceeded to reduce the mosque to rubble.

It's about time we stopped pussyfooting around about this. If you seek peaceful sanctuary in a mosque, that's one thing. If you go there and turn it into a base for attacking our forces, it stops being a sanctuary and becomes a legitimate military target. From the article:

The head of the Marines First Division, General James Mattis, defended the attack, warning if rebels used places of worship in their war against US forces, his troops would not hesitate to strike them at sacred sites.

"If they barricade themselves inside a mosque, we are not going to care about the mosque anymore than they do," Mattis said.

Neal Boortz had this on his Nuze page today:

The U.S. Marines attacked a second mosque in Fallujah, after it became clear that the insurgents were hiding out there as well (no doubt practicing the peaceful religion of Islam by firing at our troops.) The chief military spokesman in Iraq said that the Geneva convention protects the mosque, but the insurgents nullified that by attacking from there. Too bad for them...at least they won't have to worry about transporting the body for the viewing.

Editorial cartoonists Cox and Forkum (where I found the link to the article) sum it up nicely in their latest cartoon.

This represents a paradigm shift in how we carry out combat operations in Iraq. During the combat in Afghanistan, I remember watching video shot from an AC-130 gunship where they were laying waste to an enemy compound. The firepower that aircraft is able to put out is simply devastating (among other weapons, it carries a 105mm howitzer). Yet, when one of the enemy ran into a mosque that was in the compound, the commander could be heard quite clearly ordering the gunners to avoid hitting it. In that case, the guy was running to get away from the rain of destruction coming down from above. If a group of them had run in there and started firing anti-aircraft guns at the gunship, they may have pulled back rather than fire on the mosque. Now, if something like that happens, the mosque is fair game, and rightly so. As Neal Boortz said:

These radicals and their private armies need to be killed. There is no chance for peace, freedom and stability for the Iraqi people until they are. If they gather in a mosque to make the job easier ... say thanks and pull the trigger.