Now is not the time to abandon American Troops in the Field but it could be the last moment before we commit a holocaust on Baghdad. It would take a moment of real statesmanship to stop and reconsider this misguided venture before it's too late. Once the troops realize that the leaders that they believed, have been foolish, then there will be a real morale problem. It could be a moment when these officials rise to the occasion or they could fold. Too many games with overwhelming odds have created fat and slovenly behavior no matter how much time they spend in the gym or on the track. It was Custer who didn't see the Indians and who was the general who led that Cavalry into the valley of the five hundred? History is replete not only with failures but with people who turned failure into success. The problem is imagination. Bush has to imagine something totally outside of his experience and the limitations of his faith. If I wanted us to fail, I would suggest, like Elijah, that he pray harder but this is my nation too and we have made a mistake. What is required here is statesmanship no matter who wins the election or gets a tax break. What we also need are real Americans who want to give the money to save the nation instead of bleed it dry. They need another image than the parasite for their imagination. I pray that we will have it.
Ray Evans Harrell March 25, 2003 A Readers' Guide to the War By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF KUWAIT With U.S. forces running into unexpectedly strong resistance, let me suggest a couple of guideposts to monitor progress of the war: Will the invasion get bogged down? One of the scarier places in Iraq is a tiny hamlet, Umm Qasr, just over the border from Kuwait. A smuggler's haven with docks, low buildings and just 4,000 people, it was secured in the first hours of the invasion, military officials announced. Only it wasn't. Formal Iraqi Army units there crumpled, but some soldiers continued guerrilla warfare against Americans. This kind of guerrilla activity can't stop the vanguard of the U.S. Army, but it can bog us down in rear areas and interrupt the long U.S. supply lines - the longest the Marines have faced in 200 years. I've been speaking to experts in neighboring Arab countries, and some are concerned. "I think the Americans will need a new strategy," warned a senior official in an allied Arab government. That may be alarmist, because it's too soon to reach judgments. But it's fair to ask questions, and a key indicator will be whether we see more places like Umm Qasr. Will ordinary Iraqis shower U.S. troops with flowers? If the White House vision - that Iraqi citizens would cheer our invasion - was borne out, that would go a long way to defuse antagonism toward us in Europe and the Arab world. So far, though, the effusive welcome the White House counted on has been largely absent. In Safwan, some residents did shout blessings on the Americans. But reports from Basra, Nasiriya, Umm Qasr and other towns suggest there are few signs so far that the population is cheering the invasion. A Reuters correspondent, Rosalind Russell, saw a group of Iraqi youths waving as a convoy of British tanks and trucks rolled by. But once it had passed, their smiles turned to scowls. "We don't want them here," said 17-year-old Fouad. He pulled out a photo of Saddam from the waistband of his trousers and said defiantly: "Saddam is our leader. Saddam is good." Ouch. It may be that war is causing some Iraqis to rally around their leader, just as we Americans are now rallying around ours. Will we in the U.S. set Iraq policy according to facts or ideology? In the end, we will win this war, and Saddam will be gone. But it is less clear that we will win the peace, and that outcome will hinge on our willingness to adjust to realities on the ground. What troubles me most about the way the invasion has begun is that the war plans seem to be based not just on our first-rate military expertise, but also on hunches by ideologues in Washington who have never set foot in Iraq. For example, the war plan assumed that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, even though every visitor to Iraq heard ordinary people warning that they would pull out their guns and take potshots at any invading Americans. The upshot of the ideological optimism was that we adopted not the full Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, but a blend with the Rumsfeld theory of smaller, more mobile and flexible forces. The optimists didn't factor in guerrilla resistance in rear areas; indeed, they blithely expected a lovefest in Basra. "The plan was for troops to secure Umm Qasr so they would have the port to bring in wheat, and then make their way up to Basra with camera crews in tow, all easy and bloodless, where everybody would give them a big hug," an aid worker said. Instead, quite predictably, we're now besieging Basra, where one million people have been without electricity and clean water since Thursday - a deprivation that's likely to make them more hostile to U.S. occupation. We have such firepower that we can win the war without sensitivity to Iraqis, but we can't survive the occupation that way. Raising the American flag on Iraqi territory the other day was the best boost we could have given Saddam. And Arabs flinch each time American officials torture pronunciations of the names of Iraqi cities and, worse, the country itself. Granted, proper Arabic pronunciation of "Iraq" is difficult because it actually begins with a consonant, the ayn, that doesn't exist in English and sounds like a person being strangled. But since the Bush administration was willing to bring in a Hollywood producer to design a $250,000 set for the Central Command briefings, it might at least remind officials that we are not invading Eye-rack, but Ee-rack. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
