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Posted on 04/15/2003 2:19:19 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Did we start the war with enough force? As the blame game begins, the fight in Iraq is about to get a lot bloodier. The long and dangerous road to Baghdad—and beyond.
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So far in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the American military has lost two Abrams tanks. The first M1s ever destroyed by enemy fire in battle, they were caught in an ambush of the U.S. Army’s 3/7 Cavalry near As Samawah, on the west bank of the Euphrates River. Two is not a large number, and the Coalition forces have at least 650 tanks in Iraq with more on the way. But U.S. officials are worried about the skill or at least the fanaticism of the guerrilla fighters who sneaked up on the tanks driving a “technical,” a jeep, under cover of a sandstorm. More worrisome are the type and the source of the weapon apparently employed, a Russian-made Kornet antitank missile.
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The Iraqis have secretly bought as many as a thousand of these lightweight, very powerful, easy-to-use weapons. The sellers, according to Pentagon officials, are Ukrainian arms dealers (who reportedly sent Baghdad some 500 Kornets in January) and possibly some entrepreneurial Syrian generals or the Syrian government itself. Last week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointedly warned the Syrians to stop shipping military equipment, like night-vision goggles, to the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Syrian government, Rumsfeld said, would be held “accountable.” Read the transcript to Martha Brant's live talk on the war in Iraq.
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Less than two weeks into the second gulf war, does Operation Iraqi Freedom risk blowing up into a Middle East war? That scenario, once very remote, is no longer unthinkable. Some neoconservative hawks might even wish a wider war (“On to Damascus!”); more-restrained Bush administration officials dread an inflamed “Arab Street” turning on its pro-U.S. governments—a conflagration that could force regime change in, say, Amman, Jordan, before Baghdad. Barring a sudden collapse of the Baathist regime—still a possibility, senior administration officials insist—the war in Iraq is about to get bloodier. Saddam’s regime is doomed, almost certainly. But at what cost?
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With a show of “shock and awe,” American might was supposed to overwhelm the Iraqis and crack Saddam’s regime. Tipped off by a spy in Saddam’s inner circle, the U.S. military tried to kill Saddam and his wicked sons as they slept with a surprise “decapitation” strike on the first night of the war. U.S. officials were engaged in delicate secret talks with some of Saddam’s henchmen to sell out the dictator in order to save their own skins. Those talks appear to have gone nowhere. Saddam is almost surely alive; the spy, according to a knowledgeable source, has been “compromised,” meaning that he is probably dead.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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None of the crew members were hurt, so it seems likely the damage was light enough that the tanks could have been repaired-if they could be recovered. Does anyone know the fate of these two tanks?
Is it two or three tanks. One is at the bottom of the Tigres river in 60 feet of water. Neither crew member survived.
Meanwhile, back at the media, it's all gloom, doom, and defeat... quagmires, setbacks, and Vietnams. As they used to say in Russia, "there's no truth in Pravda, and no news in Izvestia." |
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The media liberals destroyed themselves with this act. This same "Woe is us!" crap was blowing through every pore in the media. But every night, Americans saw nothing but success on their own televisions. Yes, that was really Baghdad. So that's a Presidential Palace. Goodness gracious, look at all those Iraqi tanks in flames. C'mere Martha, look at this, they're dancing in the streets!