The people the "anti-war" crowd love to support

via Power Line, the news (I come to it a day late) is that the soldiers who were kidnapped from a U.S. Army compound last week (by men wearing American-looking uniforms, driving vehicles identical to those issued to our troops, etc...) were found yesterday. It is not exactly the best news possible.

Let me rephrase that: the NY Post has the right of it. It is an Atrocity in Karbala.

Four U.S. soldiers, one of them a New Yorker, were captured - and promptly murdered - last Saturday in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles from Baghdad, officials confirmed.

Two of the slain soldiers were found handcuffed together in the back of a vehicle.

Soldiers die in combat, of course.

But the murder of disarmed and helpless troops - killing POWs, in effect - is what's at issue here.

Now see the latest on this: Iran apears to have played a major role in the entire attack:

The American Forces Information Service provides the details of the attack in Karbala. Based on the sophisticated nature of the raid, as well as the response, or cryptic non-responses, from multiple military and intelligence sources, this raid appears to have been directed and executed by the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps. My sources agreed this is far to sophisticated an operation for the Mahdi Army or Badr Corps, while al-Qaeda in Iraq would have a difficult time mounting such an operation in the Shia south. "The Karbala Government Center raid the other day was a little too professional for JAM [Jaish al-Mahdi, or the Mahdi Army]," according to a military source.

This raid required specific intelligence, in depth training for the agents to pass as American troops, resources to provide for weapons, vehicles, uniforms, identification, radios and other items needed to successfully carry out the mission. Hezbollah's Imad Mugniyah executed a similar attack against Israeli forces on the Lebanese border, which initiated the Hezbollah-Israeli war during the summer of 2006.

And, yet somehow, I know there will be those who will automatically say either, "the US troops were over there, so they deserved it," or, "It's all Bush's fault." Those who do need to study Iranian history, and, perhaps, the history of Islam a little better. The only thing the American troops deserved was respect, and Bush's fault would be in doing what nobody else wanted to do -- to help clean up that scorpion's nest built up over the past centuries, and allowed to grow and fester further during recent administrations.

Nobody. But. Nobody. deserves to be tortured in this fashion.

We don't do it. But the friends of John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi do.