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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (108063)	7/25/2003 7:25:57 PM
From: NickSE	Respond to of 281500

James Morrow: US critics sink in mire of denial -- July 24, 2003 theaustralian.news.com.au SHORT-TERM amnesia is not just a disease that regularly strikes the characters of daytime soap operas and the residents of Neighbours' fictional Ramsay Street. It affects real people as well, with journalists among the most afflicted. How else to explain why so many in the media have trouble remembering recent events – such as the speedy and relatively bloodless manner in which the Iraqi government was overthrown despite their own doomsaying predictions – while holding on to enough history to regularly declare that Iraq is "another Vietnam" where US troops are sinking into that high-scoring Scrabble word, "quagmire"? But this Vietnam analogy, recently taken up by the global media after months of bleating by the anti-war, anti-Bush Left, starts to fall apart very quickly under scrutiny. The news that Saddam Hussein's two sons, the much-loathed Uday and Qusay, were killed in a firefight yesterday with US forces only further shows the bankruptcy of this already shoddy argument. Indeed, with 34 of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis dead or in US custody, the US can be said to be slowly but surely winning the mop-up phase of the war in Iraq. Those who continue to try to play the quagmire card should look at, and recall, the facts. US involvement in Vietnam lasted a decade and cost more than 50,000 US lives. So far, it has been barely four months since US troops first crossed into Iraq, and since the end of major combat on May 2, just 33 US soldiers have been killed by the so-called "Iraqi resistance". While every soldier's death is tragic (and it is touching to see so many on the Left suddenly concerned about the welfare of American men and women in uniform), it doesn't take a Stephen Hawking to figure out that these losses are nothing like those inflicted by the Vietcong. Attacks on US troops, furthermore, have been declining, not increasing, in recent days, thanks to a great deal of Special Forces work and the confiscation of tonnes of arms and ammunition – including almost 250,000 AK-47s. A further problem with calling Iraq a quagmire is that there's barely a trickle of enemy men and materiel in place to keep the mud muddy and the Americans bogged down. Those taking pot-shots at Humvees in Iraq have fewer and fewer friends overseas that can help them in their quickly losing battle for survival, though would-be jihadis have been made more than welcome to try their luck against well-armed troops instead of on the streets and in the aircraft of the West. Indeed, to borrow a much-derided phrase from the Vietnam War, George W. Bush's efforts seem to be winning at least a few important hearts and minds: Seif al Islam Gaddafi, the 29-year-old son of the Libyan dictator, recently told Time magazine that he opposes terrorism and wants to establish good relations with the US, and even Syria, the only other country to be run according to Hussein's loathsome Baathist ideology, has passed a decree opening the way to opposition parties, according to some reports. The only quagmire US troops are in any danger of sinking into are those being restored by Iraq's Shia "marsh Arabs", who saw their swampy homeland drained by Hussein to make his brutal repression of them that much easier. Still, a further bright spot to the end of the 24-hour-a-day, daddy-approved serial rape and murder spree of the Hussein brothers is that the media is starting to snap to its senses and notice that good things are happening in Iraq, too – a difficult thing to see when one is wallowing in a self-created quagmire over who sexed up whom, intelligence-wise, in the run-up to the war. US news networks reported their deaths as an unreserved good, both for Iraq and US forces there, and even the most hotel-bound reporter couldn't fail to notice the hails of gunfire being blasted into the skies above Baghdad at the news that the pair were dead. As a Pentagon official told CNN: "Given that the Iraqi people have watched CNN, it's probably very appropriate that they would be celebrating about now." How they feel when they watch the news most other days, and compare it with their reality, is anybody's guess.