U. S. policy of total extermination in Iraq?

The merry band at ¡No Pasarán! reports that French military experts have produced an evaluation of thirty months of U. S. operations in Iraq. I’m not usually given to much fisking but there’s a paragraph in the report that’s so over-the-top that I really felt the need to comment:

French

“Face à cette menace, relèvent les experts français, la seule voie possible était l’extermination complète. On en revient ainsi au “body count” -décompte des morts-…D’une part, il n’était pas question de négocier avec le “Mal” et, d’autre part, dans la logique protestante, on naît “bad guy” -mauvais garçon- plutôt qu’on ne le devient. Il suffit donc de mettre suffisamment de moyens pour les éradiquer.”

English

“Faced with this [ed. the terrorist] threat, French experts report, the only possible solution was complete extermination. We are thus back to the logic of the ‘body count’ … On the one hand, it was out of the question to negotiate with ‘Evil’ and, on the other hand, in the Protestant logic, one is born a ‘bad guy’ rather than becoming one. It is therefore necessary to use sufficient measures to eradicate them.”

Uh, no. Where do they get this stuff? First, lest anyone have the slightest doubt, it would have been well within our capabilities to exterminate all of the Iraqis without leaving our living rooms if that had been our objective. We don’t need to take casualties to engage in a policy of “complete extermination”. We only need to undertake risky operations like house-to-house urban combat to avoid complete extermination of the Iraqis or of the terrorists in Iraq for that matter.

Second, the population of Iraq is roughly 26 million people. Even the most hyperbolic estimate of the total casualties among the Iraqis is less than 250,000, i.e. less than 1%. More responsible estimates place the total casualties at closer to 10,000—far less than .1%. By what stretch of the imagination is this “complete extermination”?

Finally, the sentence that contains the phrase “on the other hand, in the Protestant logic” is so absurd that I can’t imagine by what tortured logic they came to this conclusion. A very large proportion of our military is Roman Catholic. Isn’t General Abizaid (commander of U. S. forces in Iraq) a Maronite (i.e. a Catholic)? There is zero evidence that there’s a distinctly Protestant cast to either our foreign policy or our military strategy. President Bush appears to be a sort of generic Protestant. I have no idea what his actual beliefs are. If the doctrine to which they’re referring is predestination presumably they mean the teaching there is an absolute Divine decree from all eternity positively predestining part of mankind to hell and, in order to obtain this end effectually, also to sin, that’s Calvinism, only a very small minority of Protestants in the United States believe in it, and, uh, Calvin was French.

These French military experts need to get off their Champs-Elysées and actually learn something about Iraq, the U. S. military, and, apparently, France.