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Sunday, June 22, 2003

JB

Hey George, You Put On the Flight Suit a Bit Too Soon

Jim Lobe's story from Inter Press explains:

It was just 45 days ago that President George W Bush, in a campaign-perfect photo-op, landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California, swaggered across the deck in full flight gear, and declared that ''Operation Iraqi Freedom'' had liberated that nation from the evil clutches of former President Saddam Hussein.

But within six weeks, the U.S. Central Command in Baghdad has unleashed a new campaign with a far more ominous name. ''Operation Desert Scorpion'' is designed, in the equally ominous words of Monday's 'Wall Street Journal', ''to avoid a prolonged guerrilla campaign'' that appears to be underway, at least in what is now referred to as ''the Sunni Triangle'' of central Iraq.

It is clear that the 10 weeks of chaos that followed the collapse of Hussein's government in early April have taken a serious toll on U.S. hopes that Iraqis, either out of fear and awe of Washington's military might or out of gratitude, would simply do what they were told by their liberators.


To this point many Americans have been so overjoyed that we won a quick and decisive victory in Iraq that they have not been too concerned that the Administration has failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that were the stated justification for the war.

But what happens if it turns out the war isn't over? What if turns out that we didn't win an easy victory, but are in fact in for a much longer, more difficult war of attrition, in which many more American soldiers will be killed or wounded?

Perhaps then Bush's dressing up in the costume of a military man, strutting around the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, and announcing the war is over will look arrogant, foolish, and shortsighted.

Perhaps it already does.


Comments:

The beautiful is always bizarre.
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