Traveling While Surrounded By Orcs

At American Thinker, DiPippo has a post up to remind the Democrats what life will be for his relatives and friends should the Democrats decide to encourage the Orc by abandoning all of them to their fate.

Rocco DiPippo is an American Thinker contributor and blogger at The Autonomist,

In early December, near the height of the sectarian killing in Baghdad, I took a long trip, accompanied by a civilian personal security detail, through that city and out into the surrounding towns and villages. I saw many improvised checkpoints which looked like they belonged in a Mad Max film. Getting past them intact was a matter of luck and cunning. At two of them, I barely avoided being dragged out of my car. There were several moments during that trip that I thought I would be taken hostage, or killed. You see, back then, near-anarchy sat in place of law and order.

I encountered almost 40 checkpoints that day. Most were illegitimate--hastily set up by tossing a few cement-weighted metal poles on each side of the road and channeling traffic through them. I didn't know who was manning the checkpoints, or what their agendas or alignments were. Uniforms of those manning the checkpoints, when even in evidence, were mismatched and sloppy.

Were those controlling the checkpoints "policemen" looking for Shiites or Sunnis to kill? (Terrorists in Iraq often pose as policemen; policemen in Iraq are often terrorists.) Were they legitimate members of the Iraqi Army or legitimate Iraqi Police looking to capture or kill terrorists and criminals? Were they tribesmen looking to capture, hold for ransom or kill members of a rival tribe, or were they common street criminals looking to rob, beat, rape or murder people. Were they anti-West Islamic fanatics or street criminals looking for Americans to ransom or kill?

Nearly every checkpoint reeked of badness.

As we rolled up to each one, tension inside the car would spike. I grasped a pistol, and prepared to use it. I did not feel afraid --in retrospect, I must have been afraid -- but the seething anger I felt watching shemagh-wrapped hunters (yes, these people were hunting humans) at some of those checkpoints masked the fear I must have been experiencing deep in my psyche.

That day, for the first time in my life, I faced the possibility of having to kill someone, or to be killed by them. And not only was I prepared to kill in order to protect my life, I felt an urge to kill the hunters of humans, and wanted to satisfy it by emptying my weapon into the head of any one of them who might threaten harm to me, the men with me or to the visibly frightened people in the cars around us.

Many times that day I looked out of the car's windows and saw fear: fear in the eyes of the people in the cars around me, fear in the eyes of people by the roadsides and on the streets. I could see fear in the way men walked, in the way women carried their children, in the way people crossed a street or nervously looked at passing cars or other people. Until that day I had never seen such pervasive fear. It is something I cannot forget.

People who have done no wrong should not have such fear of other people. Those innocents must somehow be protected from the human-hunters. It is the right thing to do, and America's soldiers are rightly trying to do that. Yet if the American Left and the American Democratic Party accomplish their goal of pulling the protectors from Iraq before law and order there is restored, shemagh-wrapped hunters will stalk their human prey with impunity. They will murder hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent men and women and children in Iraq. And some day America will pay a dear price for that folly when the hunters of humans, the Islamic religious fanatics, the bombers and the woman haters, emboldened by their victory in Iraq and possessing the resources to amplify their destructiveness and to extend its reach, again take aim at America's shores.