PALO ALTO, CALIF. -- The Left’s outrage factory has been working double shifts these days, fabricating massive quantities of indignation over the "illegal" use of white phosphorus--also known as “Willie Pete” or “Willie Peter”--artillery rounds by American Marines in the siege of Fallujah. If the anti-war activists are so incensed by the use of incendiary weapons, however, they might want to look a little closer to home.
WP is a terrible weapon, but it isn’t illegal, and the charges are ably refuted in this essay by Scott Burgess. All that needs to be added to Burgess’ analysis is some context: Fallujah was Al-Qaeda’s vision of paradise on earth, their ideal Taliban-style Islamic government, and it was hell. It was a nest of insurgent command and control, a site for making suicide vests and IED’s, and a slaughterhouse where beheadings were filmed and sent over the Internet to recruit more terrorists. (This slide show offers a chilling retrospective.)
Our troops are there to kill the enemy efficiently, not to inflict pain on them. When a bullet or a conventional explosive can do the job, it makes moral, tactical, and public-relations sense to employ it instead of WP. In this case, though, more Marines would have been killed had the Fallujah jihadists not been routed from their fortifications by the Willie-Peter rounds. Most of America sheds no tears for the head-hacking ghouls of Fallujah’s dungeons, who got no worse than they deserved, and who now reside where white phosphorus feels like a cool shower.
But amid this white phosphorus smokescreen, the media seems to have forgotten about a little incident in San Francisco earlier this month. At a protest on November 2, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco Chronicle building.
A Molotov cocktail, as described in this all-too-detailed Wikipedia entry, is a homemade firebomb made from a glass bottle filled with gasoline or homemade napalm. If the gasoline has been converted into napalm, either by adding soap chips (probably not a household item a