Dhari Controversy;
security Guards Killed
Traveling and I am posting via my Treo so no hyperlinks.
14 Bodies found in Baghdad, 2 near Fallujah.
3 more private security guards attacked Friday in south. 5 kidnapped Thursday unaccounted for -- WaPo.
[Reuters reports scattered political violence in Iraq on Friday, with 14 bodies found in Baghdad showing signs of torture, and two near Fallujah.
Of the five private security guards kidnapped in the south on Thursday, apparently none has been released or is known to have been killed. The governor of Basra, Muhammad al-Wa'ili of the Fadhila or Virtue Party (Shiite fundamentalist) mistakenly announced that two had been released and one killed. He was confusing that situation with an incident on Friday:
WaPo reports that
' On Friday afternoon, in the incident that Basra's governor apparently confused with the Crescent kidnapping, a shootout erupted between security contractors and Iraqi police in Zubair. A foreign security contractor was killed and a British contractor was wounded, the British military said in a statement.
Capt. Tane Dunlop, a spokesman for British forces, said British troops conducted a raid on Safwan early Friday morning to root out "individuals suspected of being involved in terrorist acts." As the troops moved on the group, they were fired upon by gunmen in a building. A firefight followed in which two gunmen were killed.
Zubair is a largely Sunni Arab town in the most Shiite south.]
Al-Zaman says some Iraqi Shiites, such as Ayatollah Baghdadi and Mahmud Hussaini Sarkhi are defending Harith al-Dhari as an Iraqi patriot. The Kurds seem not to have known about or to have approved his arrest warrant. He is a leader of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars. The Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq condemned him. He is accused of inciiting to terrorism.
Bush went to Vietnam and boasted about how we would have won if we had not quit. This was, he said, the lesson for Iraq of the Vietnam War. He managed to be wrong about two wars at once and to anger both his hosts (how churlish!) and the Iraqi public. The American Right never admitted that they lost in Vietnam, thus the Rambo movies and, Melani McAllister argues, the US admiration for Entebbe. Iraq was their chance, they thought, to get it right. Bush had also said insulting things to the Philiippines about how wonderful it was thst we had colonized them (and killed 400,000).
Colonialism is over with. When will they get that through their heads?
And actually we can't win in Iraq by just staying. Just like when you are sinking in quicksand, staying put is not a virtue.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/18/2006 12:30:00 AM
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3 Comments:
The Vietnam Syndrome Iraqi style
There have been many parallels between the disaster in Iraq and Vietnam and rightfully so. From the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the search for WMD's; From Vietnamization to "We will stand down when the Iraqi's stand up"; From the generals proclaiming "We have won every battle that we have engaged the enemy in", and so many other direct comparisons they are hard to keep tack of. Bush is now calling for more tropps to be added, and this can be compared to Nixonian escalation of the vietnam conflict. John McCain should know better, having been directly involved in Vietnam, but apparently he did not learn the lessons of Vietnam, and apparently the whole Right Wing has not either. The Right Wing has been saying that we could have won the Vietnam war if we would have stuck it out and had the will to fight on, and didn't succumb to the midset of hippie culture. This ridiculous notion is so unbelievably far removed from reality. One only needs to look at Vietnam from after the time that we left to see that our staying would have just caused more death and misery, when we left the death and misery declined to a point where even George Bush can visit the country and insult the people of Vietnam, like he does every country he goes to. What is most disturbing to me is that George Bush parrotts this false notion of being able to win Vietnam if we would have stuck it out and if that isn't bad enough, he uses it some kind of justification to stick it out in Iraq. This from the man who cheered from the sidelines while his daddy got him out of going. Why he does not get called on it in the Mainstream Media is beyond me.
On Strategy: Gulf War by by Harry G. Summers sums up nicely how the strategic misconceptions of the Vietnam war compare to the successful campaign of the Gulf War based on the ideas of Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz.
Referring to the Iraq War Andrew Bacevich asks Why read Clausewitz when Shock and Awe can make a clean sweep of things? He concludes with a summary of the administration’s myriad errors:
Underestimating the enemy, failing to understand the fractious nature of Iraqi society, relying excessively on technology, and failing to anticipate the magnitude of the nation-building task that could not be avoided. But one failure stands out. Rumsfeld’s grand plan to transform the US military was at odds with the administration’s grand plans to transform the broader Middle East. Imperial projects don’t prosper with small armies that leave quickly: they require large armies that stay. Out of this arrogance, incompetence and sheer stupidity came a policy failure that may yet beggar the debacle of Vietnam.
The "we coulda won in Nam" concept is not merely a dubyan fluke. It is a vastly held notion. Every Thanksgiving Day table, tailgate party, and high school faculty has at least a few who worship Reagan, Rambo, Rush, and O'Reilly.
Many believe that Iraq would be "won" if "the pols" (whether sell-out conservatives or weak kneed liberals) would simply stand out of the way and let the worshiped military blast everything and everyone to smithereens. Victory = Sand Creek = Dresden = Mt. Suribachi = Hiroshima. Limbaugh and O'Reilly appeal to the merely half-batty element of this Rambo school.
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