Every day the insurgents remain in control, we appear weaker. Yet, if we go in with guns blazing, we will kill a number of civilians. With the Arab media claiming that we deliberately targeting civilians in earlier clashes, you can just imagine the outcome if civilian dead are paraded, with "eyewitnesses" describing the bloodthirsty Americans.
I think this single example (and it is only one of many problems faced by the US) is enough to show why success in unlikely.
Every battle with insurgents plays on al-Jazeera as heavily armed *uniformed* soldiers going into battle, then shows the dead and wounded *civilians* lying in the streets. The fact that minutes before these same civilians had an AK47 strapped on their back and an RPG mounted on their shoulder will never be shown.
Once again, on our TVs at least, we are being shown unending footage of a little boy missing an arm and a leg at the hands *of American bombs*.
Now I don't know when the US last used bombs inside Iraqi cities, but I can be fairly sure that if an explosion takes place inside a city where children are playing, that the statistical probability is higher for an insurgent action than for an American action.
I don't know whether the bad guys are trying to turn the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the American voters, or their own supporters, but I suspect that the Americans can't win this one while al-Jazeera rules the living rooms of the Middle East...
Cheers Russell C.
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