October Surprise
October 20, 2004
Here’s a scenario: With the election just two weeks away, U.S. forces move into Fallujah after the past two weeks of steady bombardment and probing actions by U.S. forces. After a firefight, the Army and the Marines get to the center of the city and declare it pacified, announcing a major victory. And President Bush, with the election now just days away, proclaims that the United States has turned a corner in Iraq and that a major battle in the war on terror has been won.
It would, in my opinion, be enough to swing the election in Bush’s favor. It would not, of course, signify a true victory in Iraq. The insurgency goes far beyond Fallujah, and even that city would simply simmer in resentment—with continuing guerrilla attacks on occupying U.S. forces—until the Americans pulled out. But because Fallujah has become a symbol of everything that has gone wrong for Bush in Iraq, a U.S. occupation of the city would be laden with heavy symbolic value.
Meanwhile, the casualties mount. Reports the BBC : “An American air raid on the Iraqi city of Fallujah has killed six members of the same family. U.S. planes fired two rockets into the house of a couple and their four children early on Wednesday.”
The Christian Science Monitor reports that 80 percent of Fallujah’s residents have fled the city in anticipation of the coming attack. Devastation is widespread, it says. A firefight on the outskirts of the city killed a second entire family: “Media reports cited witnesses, who said that during a nine-hour battle Sunday, U.S. forces fired on a family trying to escape, killing all five. News agencies reported Fallujah doctors saying that four civilians were killed, including a child.” In an air strike against another building in Fallujah, civilian casualties were mostly children, according to Ahmad Salim, a resident who spoke to the Monitor :
"Most of them were children, all of them dead," Salim says, of the families he helped dig out of the rubble with bare hands. "When something happens, everybody runs there to help rescue, like an ambulance—maybe a friend will be [the victim] there."
It’s backfiring. Says the Monitor : “The result is new fear that is tearing at family social fabric, which Iraqis say has only hardened attitudes against American efforts.” But what’s a few dead families if it helps get Bush re-elected?
Wednesday 9:25 AM
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