Posted on 05/07/2004 8:51:47 AM PDT by knighthawk
HAVING won the war in Iraq, the United States military risks losing the peace. And in the process, the Americans are doing profound damage to the prospects for democracy in the Middle East and the prosecution of the war on terrorism. Opponents of the war in the US argue that growing casualties make Iraq like Vietnam. Right comparison, wrong example. Just 700 Americans have died in Iraq compared with about 50,000 in the Vietnam War. The challenge in Iraq is to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis by ensuring their freedom and safety, and to demonstrate the US is not an arrogant imperial occupier. It failed to achieve either in Vietnam. The appalling images of military police abusing Iraqi prisoners that have appeared this week, and the heavyhanded combat tactics used to defeat religious militias in the city of Fallujah demonstrate Washington runs the risk of doing the same in Iraq. And the Americans know it – it was a Vietnam veteran, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who invoked the memory of the My Lai massacre during the week.
The Australian was a strong supporter of the war against Saddam Hussein. Despite the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, the case for the war is beyond doubt. The dictator had form in using WMDs against his own people as well as foreign foes. Ending his wretched regime has also provided the best chance in a generation for a Middle East nation to be governed by the people, for the people, with the creation of a democratic Iraq. The possibility of a free Iraq, as an alternative to the totalitarian regimes that bind the Arab world in fear and poverty, is what Osama bin Laden fears most. It would demonstrate that Muslims will embrace democracy rather than religious rule when given the chance.
But now the stupid brutality of a handful of Americans is putting all this at risk. The images of US military police humiliating Iraqi prisoners are being seen right round the Muslim world. George W. Bush has finally apologised. He has denounced the perpetrators as un-American and promised they will face justice. Whatever their fate, it will be governed by the rule of law, a vastly different outcome to the state reliance on torture and terror that prevails in many Middle East nations. But this will not help the US President to be heard over the strident voices of Islamic fundamentalists, who will point to the pictures as evidence of what Americans do to Muslims when they get the chance.
And the self-inflicted problems of the US in Iraq go well beyond the unforgivable behaviour of renegade MPs. As Peter Wilson, who covered the Iraq war for The Australian, independent of the military media relations machine, demonstrates in his new book, heavy weapons inevitably kill innocent people when deployed in urban areas. Vehicle-mounted heavy machineguns fire with a force and a range that can slice through mudbrick-made Iraqi homes to kill innocents kilometres away. And yet the US used Marines in the recent fighting for Fallujah. These are crack troops, and while they had an obligation to clear the renegade militias from the city, their training and equipment ensure that civilian deaths, however accidental, are inevitable. The brutal reality is that in some Iraqi cities the chaos and casualties that Iraqis feared would accompany the fall of Saddam have occurred.
For the vast majority of Iraqis, life is improving fast. The economy is growing, and basic services are better than under Saddam. And Iraqis are no longer in thrall to an ineffably brutal, utterly corrupt police state. The US can still achieve the transformation of Iraq. But the way a handful of its soldiers have treated Iraqi prisoners, and the combat tactics its military are using, is making a hard job much harder.
Ah, there's an original sentence.
A_R
Heavyhanded? The Marines should have steam rolled over them and mixed their remains in with pig guts and buried them where everyone could watch.
And what, pray tell, were the 'prospects for democracy in the Middle East' before American intervention in Iraq?
Exactly! The civilized world is fearful of Islam and they are not yet ready to go to war against this mortal enemy of peace. Hence, they will hold America to impossibly delicate standards in our fight against this "religion of peace", lest we really anger Islam and increase their hatred for us. Apparently, revisionism has taken a foothold all over the world and the evils and dangers that slither out of Islam have been burried under a sea of anti Christian revisionist 'history' for too long now. The U.S. is doing the entire free world a huge favor and in their cowardace they have chosen to spit at us.
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