|
Tuesday, May 17, 2005from the AOL Top News page:GI Killed Near Tikrit The targeting of clerics is a disturbing development in the relentless insurgency, which has seen more than 470 people killed since Iraq's government was announced April 28. Call me a universalist but... If Jerry Falwell wanted to win the hearts and minds of the American people, would he blow up the unemployment agency and send people out to shoot Methodist and Lutheran preachers? The "insurgency" is very violent lately. But a dying man gasping his last can make for quite a show too. There was a time when the Baathists actually controlled areas, when Al-Qaeda's surrogates actually set the tone for how neighborhoods were run. They have given up trying to control. They're reduced to destroying. The appropriate analogy for what's happening now is Saddam's torching of the oil wells in Kuwait a few years ago. The war is lost. All that's left is the paltry satisfaction of keeping from the other guy's hands what you yourself couldn't hold on to. The "insurgency" is winning a lot of headlines. And they're praying that the American media can still save them. They know that nothing else can. But the American media overplayed its hand with the Koran-flushing bit. It's not really in a position to alert the American people to the need to throw out Bush this week. In a few weeks, this story will become repetitive... and boring. The coverage will die down as media execs inform reporters that they can't squander the whole enterprise on their anti-war tear. And the attacks, in turn, will fade. Not because Al-Qaeda won't be trying. But because another recruiting drive is on the verge of failure. The only way to get news coverage now is to be awful enough to risk losing what little support is left among the Iraqi people. Is Iraq over? No. Hell, we've still got troops in Germany with World War Two half a century past and even the end of the Cold War a decade behind us. The Iraq thing will be a problem in which we're involved, and in which the Iraqi people are deeply involved, for some time to come. But despite the headlines - because of the headlines - things are moving in the right direction. 
posted by gbarto at 10:10 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
