They used to be Romans

In a self-serving face-saving report designed to avert attention away from the idiotic idea of paying ransom to terrorists, Italy yesterday blamed "stress and inexperience" among U.S. troops for the shooting death of its top intelligence agent in Baghdad but accepted that he was killed accidentally. Before they crucified Christ, Italians were a great warrior class known as Romans. Now, after the crucifixion, they’re just Italians. Before the crucifixion, Rome would march the legions to deal with kidnappers leaving behind them a new road lined with heads of the kidnappers and their supporters on pikes. Now they send an intelligence agent in an Armani suite and a couple of Gucci bags filled with cash. Before the crucifixion, Rome ruled the world. Now, the Italians are reduced to spray painting Roman monuments with graffiti and second guessing those with the most influence in the world.

A couple things jump out about this whole thing. First and most obvious, crucifixion of the Messiah is a bad idea. Second, great civilizations do not remain great forever. They remain great only as long as they are willing and able to exert influance. Next and nearly as obvious as the first, paying millions to murderous, kidnapping, Islamo-terror-fascists who then use the money to murder and kidnap is a bad idea. Then, if you are going to pay off the terrorist, you sure wouldn’t want the world to know about it. You might even be so bold as to try to run a US checkpoint rather than be caught red-handed giving into the terrorists. Last, once caught, you might try to avert attention from the ransom payment by blaming the soldiers, whose checkpoint you tried to run, claiming they were stressed and inexperienced.

There supposedly is a predator tape of the incident that shows the car approaching the checkpoint at a high rate of speed and not slowing down. At that point, given what’s going on in Iraq, the soldiers acted in the only way they could. Besides, to my way of thinking, once you pay a ransom to terrorists, anything that happens subsequent to that is on your hands.