Americans did not try to kill reporter out of irritation

Italy mourned Intelligence Officer Nicola Calipari Monday in Rome. He was killed when American (that’s us) troops fired on his vehicle at a checkpoint in Iraq. He was escorting freed Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter who had been kidnapped in Iraq.

Sgrena worked for the communist publication Il Manifesto, a “fierce opponent of the war and a frequent critic of U.S. policy,” according to My Way News.

Now let me make one thing clear before I go on. Her criticism of American policy and anti-war views in no way make her deserving of what she’s had to go through – first the kidnapping, followed by the shooting in which she was injured by shrapnel and Calipari was killed.

She has been through a terrible ordeal and my heart goes out to her – as it does to all innocents captured by cowardly terrorists.

Sgrena, however, feels that she was intentionally targeted by Americans because we found her “happy ending” to hostage negotiations “irksome.”

Basically she’s saying that because we make it known that we do not encourage negotiation with terrorists, for very good reasons which I will address in a moment, we would intentionally target a foreign journalist whose country successfully frees her from captivity by the very people we’re fighting.

“The Americans are against this type of operation,” she said. “For them, war is war, human life doesn’t count for much.”

This is an odd point of view since, if human life meant just a little less to us, far fewer of our soldiers would have lost it. By this I mean that because our attempts to “win hearts and minds” and preserve the lives of Iraqi innocents, we have had more difficulty fighting insurgents. If we didn’t care about human life, we could just drop a couple of 500 pound bombs on Fallujah and end that problem.

But yes, it is our policy not to negotiate with terrorists. The news story said, quite correctly, that, “U.S. officials have cautioned against ransoms, saying they only encourage further kidnappings.”

This is absolutely true. My heart breaks for everyone who is kidnapped because I know we can never in good conscience negotiate with their captors. It would only endanger more lives.

If, every time someone is kidnapped, that person’s country withdraws from Iraq and we give the captors what they demand, the terrorists will be running the world. Literally.

Spain went so far as to elect a president based on further terrorist threats. The terrorists tried the same stuff with us, threatening major attacks if we didn’t elect John Kerry.

How could we ever allow them to dictate our foreign policy through kidnappings and beheadings? That would be the height of irresponsibility.

However, if another country disagrees with us and decides to either withdraw troops or pay a ransom, we would never target the hostage out of annoyance. That’s not how things work. Our goal was never to lose the hostage’s life. What would we have to gain from such behavior?

I am sorry for Calipari and I am sorry for Sgrena. But if we give in to these terrorists, we will be far worse off than we are now.

I’m sure this was exactly what the White House said it was: a tragic accident on the part of highly stressed troops.