Counterinsurgent of the Day: Captain Brian von Kraus

One of Abu Muqawama's regular readers wrote in regarding yesterday's video of kids in Iraq going through Al-Qaeda training to say that what the kids were doing really didn't look all that much different from when she and her brother played "Army" in the backyard. (We presume she meant when she was little, not when she is, you know, home for the holidays. That would be Abu Muqawama and his cousins.) Do these Iraqi kids, she asked, really even understand what they're doing? Or is this a game for most of them?

And couldn't we give these kids something else to do? Maybe Captain Brian von Kraus -- on his third tour of duty in Iraq -- noticed all those lil' rascals in the Al-Qaeda video were wearing Real Madrid and didn't take this to mean, as Abu Muqawama did, that the kids were fascistas. Maybe they just want to play soccer.

[Thanks, Audrey]