Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
Coordinated bombings rip across the middle of Iraq, killing 35 and injuring 224, and a few hours later President Bush, in his best night-is-day-up-is-down form, inexplicably announces that the attacks show we are winning the war that he said we already won six months ago.
Explaining Monday's car-bombings in Baghdad, President Bush said, "The more progress we make on the ground... the more desperate these killers become." If the president defines desperation as assaults that are more methodical, coordinated and destructive than previous ones, he's right.
Not surprisingly, the international media begs to differ with Bush's interpretation and the few humanitarian NGOs that remain in Iraq are starting to pack up and leave rather than staying on as easy targets. Just in case you might be considering paying Bush's bizarre argument some credence, you should make sure to catch Robert Fisk's last two columns from Iraq here and especially here.
Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under attack - or who merely pass the scene of an American raid - are being gunned down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these killings routinely result in either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of engagement" - rules that the Americans will not disclose to the public. [...] Not a single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians - even when the fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities.
[...]
The daily attacks on Americans outside Baghdad - up to 50 in a night - go, like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded. Travelling back from Fallujah to Baghdad after dark last month, I saw mortar explosions and tracer fire around 13 American bases - not a word of which was later revealed by the occupation authorities. At Baghdad airport last month, five mortar shells fell near the runway as a Jordanian airliner was boarding passengers for Amman. I saw this attack with my own eyes. That same afternoon, General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, claimed he knew nothing about the attack, which - unless his junior officers are slovenly - he must have been well aware of.
The question is not whether we are winning or losing. We began losing the moment we allowed ourselves to be sucked into this miasmic nightmare by an incompetent, ideologically-blinded leadership. Only two ways exist to win a war: drive an expansionist power back into its borders or annex disputed territory, and neither applies to this situation. The dead Iraqis, the dead UN/NGO workers, and the western soldiers returning home in coffins (which can no longer be shown in the media, per administration fiat) have already lost everything. The soldiers that have been stuck in that toxic wasteland and their families lose a little more every day. The only question that remains: how long will we allow our bare-assed emperor to keep going "double or nothing" at the three-card monte table and charging it to the national credit card?
UPDATE (5:10 pm): Molly Ivins says more or less the same thing.
Despite what I am sure are the invaluable services of the many PR people of our nation, sometimes it is actually smarter to attack the problem itself than the public relations surrounding it. I suspect that's where we are with the situation in Iraq.TrackBack
This is actually properly regarded as a Public Health issue. The fanatic ideology of the islamist is remarkably parallel to the definition of the pathologically criminally insane. The suicide/homicide bomber *is* a very real danger to himself and others. Indiscriminately targeted innocent civilian others. Like New Yorkers.
Consequently it seems to me that the only thing to do is to hunt them down and kill them. Which we will do, irrespective of those too squeamish to follow through on the proper response to those responsible for September 11.
And that proper response, as to any outbreak of a particularly deadly disease, is to stamp it out and not let it spread. This protects Public Health. In this regard, there perhaps should be a liason office opened between the Office of Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control.
David,
Your analogy only goes so far, and not very far, at that. An organization composed mostly of Saudis and Pakistanis carry out attacks on the US mainland and so consequently we place 1/2 of our armed forces in Iraq - arguably the most secular state in the region, and one in which al-Qaeda types were generally jailed, murdered, or exiled. So it isn't squeamishness; it's that Iraq HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11.
We took a country that was in no way a terrorist threat and turned it into one. We cut and ran without doing Afghanistan properly and it has now reverted to anarchy, the spring from which the Taliban first flowed. Your suggestion that we should hunt down and kill suicide bombers has a couple of flaws:
1. Suicide bombers are already dead.
2. This leaves pre-emptively killing Islamists, who probably number in the hundreds of millions worldwide.
The "proper response" to 9/11 would be securing our ports, power plants, water supplies, airlines, etc. All we have done is taken most of our emergency first responders and stuck them in an utterly unrelated country.
And that proper response, as to any outbreak of a particularly deadly disease, is to stamp it out and not let it spread.
Unfortunately, we are not dealing with a virus, bacterium, or pathogen here. You can no more stamp out fanatic Islamism than you could stamp out poverty, jealousy, or bad hair days. You might have noticed that our furious stamping in Iraq has produced a recruiting boom for al-Qaeda. Similarly, Israel's far more furious stamping in the Occupied Territories has only further radicalized the Palestinians and ensured new suicide bombers.
Simplistic analogies (terrorism=disease) seldom reveal any transferrable strategies.
Posted by: apostropher at October 29, 2003 02:21 PM