But then when you think of the air strikes that devastated the happy kite-flying paradise of the Smurf, you see who the UN thinks threaten the children: somebody with a powerful air force. As Mark Steyn notes:
Why would Unicef show such an implausible form of Smurficide ? Well, whether intentionally or not, they are evoking the war that most of their audience - in Belgium and beyond - is opposed to: the Iraq war, where the invader did indeed have an air force. That's how the average Western "progressive" still conceives of warfare, as something the big bullying Pentagon does to weak victims.
But this week is a week to remember that there are worse things than war that "affect the lives of children". If I were Papa Smurf, I wouldn't want Baby Smurf to grow up in Saddam's Iraq. I don't mean just because we'd be the beleaguered minority of Smurfistan, to be gassed and shovelled into mass graves.
Even if we were part of Saddam's own approved class living in the Smurfi Triangle, it's still a life permanently fixed between terror and resignation, in which all a parent's hopes for his children are subordinate to the whims of a psycho state.
Yep, if you really wanted to show the actual threats to the Smurfs, you'd show Smurfs being raped, or hacked with machetes, or gassed as they slept, or fed into plastic shredders, or run over by tanks, or shot down by Kalashnikovs in a UN-designated Smurf safety zone, or necklaced with burning tires, or rousted from their homes as government thugs clean out their slums, or blown up as they ate at Smurf pizza parlors, or starved to death by militias while the UN researched its ninth report on the situation. Or perhaps even sexually abused by the UN peacekeepers themselves to cut out the middle thug. But no, air power is the tool that UNICEF envisions for Smurf devastation and sorrow. And we all know that when you think bombing, think United States Air Force.
And even in their twisted view of who poses a threat to children, UNICEF gets it wrong. If America was doing the bombing, a couple of JDAMs--possibly with an inert concrete warhead--would have taken out the threats to the Smurfs or the top evil Smurf and left the vast majority of the Smurfs alive and well to go on living their happy Smurfy lives.
Air power is the last thing the innocent Smurfs of the world need to fear.
