Yesterday, 10 Iraqis, most of them policeman, died when a suicide bomber rammed into a police station in Kirkuk. Since April, more than 300 Iraqi policemen have died in similar attacks.
What do the terror wars against Israel and in Iraq have in common?
The common denominator is obviously hatred of the West, particularly Israel and the US. But it is more than that. Both campaigns of suicide and mass murder epitomize an Arab penchant for destruction so frenzied so as to almost become an end in itself.
It is no coincidence that suicide on the personal level has become the centerpiece of a suicidal campaign on the civilizational level. It might be argued that the suicide bombers here or in Iraq have a "constructive" goal: the creation of Taliban-like Islamic states.
Ascribing even this motivation is, however, too generous. Do these mass murderers really have a flourishing state of any kind in mind as they obliterate themselves and the innocent people around them?
The suicide bomber who calmly sat on a Jerusalem bus on Sunday waiting for it to fill up before blowing himself up was only thinking:
'How can I kill as many Jews as possible?' In Iraq, the terrorists' thinking is similar: How can they prevent Iraq from becoming the first successful Arab democracy? In both cases, the real, motivating goal is destruction.
In Israel's case, this was made particularly clear when the Palestinians turned down a state offered to them on a silver platter by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton, preferring to resume a war to destroy the only Jewish state. One might think that people who see themselves as stateless would care about building their own state more than destroying another, but that turned out to be a wrong guess.
Now the US is building its policy on the hope that Iraq will be the first Arab country to build a true democracy. The terrorists, be they Ba'athist holdovers or foreigners backed by Syria, Iran, or al-Qaida, desperately hate and fear the prospect of Iraqi democracy.
As an editorial in the English-language Saudi paper Arab News put it, "Iraqis are keen to take back control of their country, and many are acutely aware of the opportunity they now have to build a new and fairer society... It is this growing feeling of restored honor and the rising confidence of Iraqis which is now the target of the terrorists."
A document recently captured in Iraq and believed by the US to have been written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a top terrorist associated with both Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, reported on the attacks against the US and its allies.
"There is no doubt that our field of movement is shrinking and the grip around the throat of the Mujahidin has begun to tighten. With the spread of the army and police, our future is becoming frightening," Zarqawi writes. Warning of the day that the US hands over power to Iraqis, he laments, "This is the democracy, we will have no pretext [for further attacks]."
It is becoming clearer that we are not only seeing dichotomies between peace and terror and between freedom and tyranny, but between those who want to build and those who only know how to destroy – both themselves and their societies.
Zarqawi anticipates a day when the roving jihadis must "pack up and leave and look for another land, just like it has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By God, this is suffocation!" This is the essence of the war against the jihadis, where the game is not to swat at them, but to dry the political swamps in which they had been able to hide and multiply.
Iraq was and is a critical battleground in the war against terrorism. Zarqawi has told us how jihad can be beaten: suffocation by democracy. The road of battling terror militarily with one hand and by supporting the forces of freedom with the other is neither short nor simple, but there is no other.
In our own situation, separation may be a necessary stopgap, but it is only that. There will be no peace until there is new leadership on the other side of the fence.
