Hi all; Great news that two of Saddam's sons are gone. This is progress towards the closing of this war. It marks another line item that Bush can realistically claim as a bullet in his list of stuff to declare victory about.
Of course killing those guys won't have a significant effect on the guerilla war. They weren't even in Arab territory, but instead were hiding out in Iraqi Kurdistan. To win a war you have to kill a lot of brave men. The cowards don't count. So in this sense, the killing or capture of the sons doesn't matter much.
But the Bush administration and the neocons have put a lot of faith onto their latest rose-colored glasses interpretation of reality, and that is that it is Saddam and his sons that are organizing the guerilla activity against us.
When the level of guerilla activity fails to fall even after Saddam himself is captured, the war party will have to admit that they truly are in a Palestinian style quagmire. Okay, well most of them will just retreat to the next line of defense, probably claiming that the guerilla war is being run by the governments of Syria and Iran. But the deaths / capturing of Saddam, without a halt to the guerilla war, will put more of the swing voters into the "the war against Iraq was an idiocy" column.
That's the beginning of the end of this war.
-- Carl
P.S. Bilow quotes of interest re the importance of Saddam and the Baathists in the guerilla war in Iraq:
Bilow, March 24, 2003
Yes, I was praying against hope that the war would be this way, but my fears have been realized. We're going to leave with our tails between our legs, just like we did with Vietnam. I'm going to guess that we kill Saddam before we go, so we will be able to claim a victory of sorts. But as far as pacifying and occupying Iraq? Not a chance, even our journalists still can't walk around without armor protection in tiny southern Sunni towns, much less Baghdad or Basra.
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And the fact is that we're very likely to kill Saddam soon. I would not be surprised if the surviving Baathist leadership surrenders. But none of that is the problem. The real problem is pacifying the Iraqi population. #reply-18743693 |
