Posted on 10/28/2003 4:07:31 PM PST by saquin
If this were the opening salvo in a murderously dirty battle for Baghdad, it misfired badly. Not because the bombers failed, but because, on the first day of the month of Ramadan that Islam devotes to prayer, fasting and good deeds, they so sickeningly succeeded.
This is not an unthinking endorsement of George W’s assertion that these explicitly terrorist assaults, Iraq’s first experience of coordinated suicide bombings, underlined the desperation of men out to reverse the progress made by coalition forces. Bush should have cut out self-congratulation, saluted the courage of the thousands of Iraqis risking their lives to rebuild their shattered society and acknowledged America’s responsibility to afford them all the protection in its power against their enemies.
Monday’s attacks misfired because they hideously proved to Iraqis that it is not US troops, but they themselves, their families, their livelihoods, their hopes for the future and for their children, that are in the front line of terrorist fire.
The terrorists struck against order, and order is what Iraqis yearn for. For the first time in decades, the police are working with, not against, the people. Despite repeated attacks, 55,000 Iraqis have joined the reconstituted force. Good local intelligence is what Islamist terrorists and Saddam loyalists fear most. Soldiers patrolling a strange land can never be as effective as national police in hunting down terrorists and the vindictive remnants of Saddam’s hated Republican Guards and secret police. This is why the police are persistently targeted; the eight killed and 65 wounded yesterday were fighting the people’s fight.
Near the bombed al-Elam police station, an elderly shopkeeper said, surveying his wrecked display cases: “For myself, I am just sad; but for the whole country I am very, very angry.” Of the 42 dead counted yesterday in Baghdad’s mortuaries, 19 were women and 2 were children. Of the 12 shredded corpses outside the bombed-out office of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 10 were those of Iraqi passers-by.
In Iraq, the ICRC is accorded not just the respect felt for the United Nations; it is loved. It has been constantly present for 23 lonely years, tracing the Iraqi prisoners and missing-in-action of Saddam’s wars, healing people denied medicines by a regime that used dying children for its mendacious propaganda, persistently if unavailingly seeking access to its unspeakable prisons.
Will suicide bombings, repeated in Fallujah yesterday, be more effective than military ambushes in driving the US from Iraq by chipping away at American public support? The Americans face a daily average of 26 ambushes and sniper attacks, concentrated in the Saddam heartlands, but in truth, considering the stacks of unsecured hardware littering Iraq, it is remarkable what poor use the attackers have made of it. Even in Sunday’s Katyusha attack on the al-Rashid hotel, many missiles failed to fire in an operation that had evidently taken weeks of planning.
But, in this strategy, military success is as irrelevant as it is unachievable. In Vietnam in 1968, the US military decisively repulsed Hanoi’s waves of attacks in the Tet offensive; yet the television footage misled people far from the battlefield into believing the conflict to be unwinnable and turned Americans against the war.
The use of terrorism is intimidation. The more Americans feel on their own in Iraq, runs the enemy logic, the likelier that is. The suicide bombers themselves may have been hate-driven fanatics, but their paymasters are more calculating. Their goal is to thwart the internationalisation of the reconstruction effort by scaring off aid workers, contractors and investors, the UN and its agencies, and potential contributors of peacekeepers. Only if Iraq is seen as an American and British, not international, challenge can murder be misrepresented as “resistance to occupation”.
So far the attackers are losing this wider opinion war. Albeit with noisy Franco-German carping, the UN Security Council has unanimously endorsed a strategy that leaves the US in effective control during an accelerated transition to properly representative Iraqi self-government. At Madrid, donors came up with enough money to kick-start recovery from two decades of dictator-induced collapse. There is little doubt that Congress, hopefully entirely in grants, rather than loans, as Mr Bush rightly insists, will eventually approve America’s $20 billion contribution, testimony of US commitment to the “long, hard slog” that Donald Rumsfeld candidly anticipates.
The US started by underestimating the difficulty. It was folly to disband the entire Iraqi Army, which is only slowly being rebuilt. Yet Iraq is far from becoming the world capital of Islamist terrorism that critics predicted. The US is right not to have made Baghdad a maze of fortified bomb barriers. Iraqis are struggling towards an open, free society. That dream is their psychological defence against the terror visited on them this week.
BTW did you notice they set off that bomb today in Falljauh(sp) near a secondary school.......I bet that fact wasn't lost on the citizens in that city.
Almost exactly what he said. So-called journalist wasn't listening.....again.
If it is as it seems, then it suggests (1) that we really have hurt al-Qaeda; (2) that the Baathists have less popular support than projected early in the war; (3) there's a mole in the Iraqi government giving intel to the bad guys (that's a pretty safe bet, actually); (4) that outside forces are going to start to find things less and less comfortable as the predominantly Iraqi body count rises, and (5) we will continue to experience this sort of thing, supported by Saudi and Egyptian money and performed by non-Iraqi jihadists infiltrating from Iran and Syria.
What is supremely ironic is that for all the talk of Saddam not being proven to be connected with 9/11, it is extremely likely that at least some of the perpetrators of this terrorism are, and that they're much less impressive when forced to conduct even quasi-warfare instead of cold-blooded acts of murder against unsuspecting, unarmed civilians. The difference between this and Vietnam is 3000 dead people in New York. The left can sneer that there's no connection all it wants, but the American people aren't buying it.
This is just a stupid comment. He's done this over and over again.
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