When the Course Can't be Stayed

[drewb]

It's hard to know which is the better analogy for our predicament in Iraq: Vietnam or Israel.

What makes me think of Israel, though, is last week's American bombing raid near the central Iraq town of Tikrit -- an attempt to wipe out the anti-occupation guerrillas thought to be ensconced there. It sounds for all the world like the retaliatory raids that follow virtually every suicide bomb attack in Israel. And the logic by which the decision to strike at largely civilian targets is the same.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9094-2003Nov23?language=printer

[brainshrub]

1. There are three important differences

between what Israel is doing to Palestine versus what the US is doing in Iraq.

1) An imaginary cloud-being didn't tell the founding fathers that their children's, children's, children's, children's children have property-rights in Iraq.

2) The average American has no desire to settle in Iraq.

3) Iraq has a history of nationhood with boarders that are beyond dispute.

Therefore, I think Vietnam is a better analogy as to what is going on.

[bemildred]

2. Hmmm.

And they may be more than that. One hears more and more some
version of the theory I first heard from D.L. Cuddy, author of a
book about Iraq called "Cover-Up: Government Spin or Truth?" Cuddy's
notion is that the guerrilla war we're now flailing against is
precisely the war Saddam Hussein intended to fight all along. That,
he argues, is why Hussein offered only token resistance, preferring
to wait for the coalition to disperse into smaller patrols, vulnerable
to hit-and-run assaults. Saddam, in this scenario, doesn't need
victory; he only needs chaos, uncertainty, demoralization -- and the
fervent wish by most Iraqis that the outsiders just go home.

Not sure this is I/P, but what the heck.

This war is the war that some of us here predicted that Saddam
would fight some months before the war started. It is and was
the obvious thing to do.

Edit: DU