Who is the "Home Team"?

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, fresh off demagoging the election results in Ohio, decided to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King by by offering the following statement:

"We call the home team the insurgents and we're the home team," Jackson said sarcastically. "Dr. King, what are we doing?"

(link courtesy of Shaking Spears)

Hmmm, the "home team". By calling the Baathist/Wahhabist terror alliance in Iraq the "home team", Reverend Jackson is according them the moral standing of a heroic underdog fighting to free their homeland from the evil American imperialists. It is possible to take such a view, if you are willing to blind yourself to the endless litany of murders, beheadings, car bombs, and numerous other atrocities committed by the terrorists. Equally important to this viewpoint is to ignore the fact that Iraqis are the primary victims of these attacks. Finally, failing to pay any attention to the "home team's" numerous denunciations of democracy as an "infidel" institution is also necessary. The "home team" are not fighting to free Iraq, they are fighting to enslave it, or in some cases to re-enslave it.

No, Reverend Jackson, the Baathist thugs and Wahhabi fanatics are not the "home team". The "home team" are Iraq's Shia, 60% of the population, who have endured decades of repression and a year and a half of terrorist atrocities, yet have courageously persevered in order to achieve their final empowerment at the ballot box. The "home team" also includes Iraq's Kurdish population, 15% of the nation, who lost over 100,000 people to Saddam's "Anfal" campaign of 1987-88, were subjected to brutal ethnic cleansing, and who suffered terrorist attacks at the hands of the Baathists and Wahhabists even before the fall of Saddam. The "home team" also features Christians, Assyrians, Turkomen, and those Arab Sunnis who believe in democracy. The "home team" in short, consists of the vast majority of the Iraqi people who want the January 30 elections to go forward, in the face of a terrorist onslaught of assassinations, car bombs, kidnapping, and murder. The terrorists are not the "home team", the Iraqi people are.

It's okay to think that being in Iraq is a bad idea. But attaching any sort of moral legitimacy to the Baathist/Wahhabist terror alliance is a repugnant display of moral bankruptcy.