"Why Baghdad Will Not Be Another Stalingrad"

[DivinBreuvage]

http://www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2003/032403a.html

What a difference a year makes. From the article, written almost exactly a year ago:

But the important point about the Red Army's performance at Stalingrad is that it was only one of many such heroic episodes on the Eastern front. Driving that defense was the ferocious nature of the German campaign in Russia -- an unprecedented war of destruction, plunder, enslavement and annihilation.

The war against Iraq will be a war to secure western interests, but it will also be a war to liberate the country from Saddam. As long as the British and Americans avoid large-scale civilian casualties it is difficult to envisage more than a tiny minority of Iraqis being prepared to wage war to the death.

[PATRICK]

1. Blind to the real paradigm!

Not Vietnam. Not Stalingrad. Not Vichy France.

The horrifying error that ALL these experts are making is not looking into the mirror. A second error is totally misjudging what Iraq IS as well.

I am hearing EXACTLY the same echos that have supported occupying armies and their strategies in the past, including Vietnam. What is being repeated is a paternalistic mindset, a mature good old boy wiseman reasoning, a total miscalculation of the driving human passions both on the actual ground and in the leadership in the WH and in the underground of Iraq. That single gross miscalculation, that putting your faith in the wonderfully powerful US forces trapped between Bush and the Iraqi "insurgents" is creating another "Greek tragedy".

The political battle is already lost. The military solution cannot occur. The WH at any rate is more stupidly inflexible and wrong sighted(besides not having the good of Iraq prominent at all in their calculation) than even these benign fluffheads, well wishers of rationality and accommodation.

The conundrum is not even discussed. The "solution" entails a radical regime change among the blundering aggressors who set our troops on a collision course with failure and national shame. Everyone is hiding from the truth by trying to solve irksome problems piecemeal and in the small ways left without handling the idiots who continue to ruin us.

It is not Vietnam or Stalingrad. It is the SAME arrogant bravos matter-of-factly assuming that might is right and invincible. The architects and manipulators did not get away with it at Nuremberg. usually, in history, they mostly do, leaving the peoples they betrayed with all the ignorant and divided rancor and guilt.

They all talk the talk and force US to walk the walk in the same old way, no matter the time or place or the heartrending plea of humanity united for peace and progress.

Face that monster and you will know that yes it is the same Horseman of the Apocalypse riding tall in the saddle- and even the noblest ideals sold to various wisemen are bloody frauds doomed to defeat and disdain.