GIVEN HOW THICK THEIR SKULLS ARE, IT MIGHT JUST WORK... Rich Lowry looks at the silliness of the human shields in Iraq, or as he calls them, "the Western kids who flocked to Iraq hoping to stare up at the business end of B-2 bombers", but decided to come home, when Saddam actually wanted them to defend military targets:

About half of the 200 shields have quit after realizing, as one kid told The Washington Times, "No humanitarian sites were made available to us." Even the Iraqi government isn't stupid or anti-American enough to think that the United States will deliberately target hospitals, mosques and schools. For that sort of poisonously out-of-touch view of American power, you must turn to left-wing Westerners.

Other shields are still stationed at electrical plants, water-pumping stations and oil refineries. Thus, the world gets the spectacle of the same people who complain about America's military-industrial complex trying to save parts of Iraq's.

The operational theory of the shields never made much sense: that they could stop a war that would be heedlessly waged against civilians by presenting the U.S. military with the possibility that it might hit a few civilians. Top shield Ken O'Keefe, an American, addresses this paradox by arguing that only white civilians matter to the United States, so the shields can stop bombs even as Iraqi civilians are killed.

So O'Keefe (reachable either at Baghdad's Palestine International Hotel or at the Daura Electrical Plant) has been guilty of discriminatory recruiting: treasonous black left-wing zealots need not apply. If there were justice in the world, O'Keefe would have to return home and report directly to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In the meantime, read the whole thing. And check out Tim Blair's recent post on the subject.