Torture Chamber Found in Mosque

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- "There are the bloodstains on the wall, and here it is dried on the floor," says Abu Muhanad as he walks through a torture chamber in a Baghdad mosque where more than two dozen bodies have been found.

The above is an excerpt from a CNN piece here. Evidently, the militant thugs known as the Mehdi Army, led by renegade thug-in-residence Muqtada al Sadr, terrorized Baghdad pretty severely during their stronger days, back before the surge.

But thuggery doesn't work, does it? Noooo. It doesn't. The world should have learned this by watching Nazi Germany crumble in the 1940s, Soviet Russia crumble in the 1990s, the Taliban fall apart in 2003 and 2004, and the outright collapse of totalitarian regimes all over the world.

Totalitarian oppression doesn't work.

What works is the rule of law, and the solid, consciencous application of self-rule. This is what the surge was all about: routing these lawless pieces of filth from their nasty little hidey-holes and sending them running, or killing them where they stand, or packing their sorry backsides - US Government-supplied Kor'an in hand - off to Gitmo Vacationland.

What works is ensuring that the people have a right to own the fruits of their labor. Ensuring that the people have the freedom to live peacably and prosperously.

The beginning of this prosperity, in the case of Iraq, is removing (destroying, when necessary) the forces that were so firmly in place in opposition to freedom. That means these people who were so clearly using this mosque as a place of torture and murder.

The surge put a stop to that, at least in this location. So what conclusions can we draw from all of this? Well, for one thing, there's the most obvious conclusion that those who opposed the surge were wrong. Because if Barack Obama and his ilk had had their way - if there had been no US troop surge in Iraq, the Mehdi Army would still be in control of this nBaghdad neighborhood, and this mosque would still be a factory of death.