Friday, June 18, 2004
The Killing and Destruction: How Much Can the System Take?
A suicide car bomb today killed nearly forty recruits and wounded a hundred and forty at an army recruiting center in Baghdad. This was echoed fifty miles north by another deadly car bomb. The new interim government says that it will institute "martial law" to stop all this. But in most of Iraq I would have thought that was pretty much what already existed. The U.S. is still "letting the Iraqis handle it", and both we and they seem to like it that way. Yet in what sense can the forces of the interim government, or we, effectively reduce the carnage? Whoever is behind the attacks, they seem to have plenty of volunteers and endless supplies of weapons (as a result of an enormous stockpiling of weapons by Saddam and the failure of the United States to adequately address these stockpiles). McCain and others continue to say we need more troops. I am sure he is right. But another division would only make a difference if we were to start using it effectively. What we desperately need is for the American commanders and the new government to work out their respective responsibilities, being sure to give U.S. forces a larger role in the immediate future than they seem to have now.
Incidentally, the beheading of the American engineer in Saudi Arabia looks very much like Zarqawi's beheading of another American in Iraq a few weeks back. At least some of what is going on in Iraq appears to be tied to the al-Qaida effort in Saudi Arabia; probably both are more closely tied than we have been led to believe to Bin Ladin and company on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
I remain dismayed by the extent to which the Times chooses to place happenings in Iraq on inside pages while spending page after page on the 9/11 inquiry and the mistakes of the Bush administration. I think this record is important. But right now we are in a desperate struggle in Iraq and the surrounding area. Finding that Cheney sticks foolishly to the stories that led us into Iraq or that pilots and their commanders on 9/11 failed to have or understand authorization to shoot down planes until it was too late is not critical right now. I would agree that exposing all the errors and so incompetancies of the past may (and I have my doubts) help Kerry defeat Bush. Yet the fact is we must deal now with Iraq. By the time Kerry gets in, if he does, the situation will either have brightened greatly or we may irretrievably be on our way out.
Finally, is it time for despair? Probably not yet. Remember that after the disastrous losses of American lives in April many commentators, including some of the nation's top defense intellectuals, thought we had lost. Their solution was simply to get out. But instead we started to reduce our presence on the streets without leaving, and the numbers of Americans killed dropped greatly in May. June may also be low. But what has changed is that now the danger is not so much American lives lost as Iraqi lives lost. It remains to be seen whether this challenge can be met. Let us give the situation another six weeks and then see how it's going.
A suicide car bomb today killed nearly forty recruits and wounded a hundred and forty at an army recruiting center in Baghdad. This was echoed fifty miles north by another deadly car bomb. The new interim government says that it will institute "martial law" to stop all this. But in most of Iraq I would have thought that was pretty much what already existed. The U.S. is still "letting the Iraqis handle it", and both we and they seem to like it that way. Yet in what sense can the forces of the interim government, or we, effectively reduce the carnage? Whoever is behind the attacks, they seem to have plenty of volunteers and endless supplies of weapons (as a result of an enormous stockpiling of weapons by Saddam and the failure of the United States to adequately address these stockpiles). McCain and others continue to say we need more troops. I am sure he is right. But another division would only make a difference if we were to start using it effectively. What we desperately need is for the American commanders and the new government to work out their respective responsibilities, being sure to give U.S. forces a larger role in the immediate future than they seem to have now.
Incidentally, the beheading of the American engineer in Saudi Arabia looks very much like Zarqawi's beheading of another American in Iraq a few weeks back. At least some of what is going on in Iraq appears to be tied to the al-Qaida effort in Saudi Arabia; probably both are more closely tied than we have been led to believe to Bin Ladin and company on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
I remain dismayed by the extent to which the Times chooses to place happenings in Iraq on inside pages while spending page after page on the 9/11 inquiry and the mistakes of the Bush administration. I think this record is important. But right now we are in a desperate struggle in Iraq and the surrounding area. Finding that Cheney sticks foolishly to the stories that led us into Iraq or that pilots and their commanders on 9/11 failed to have or understand authorization to shoot down planes until it was too late is not critical right now. I would agree that exposing all the errors and so incompetancies of the past may (and I have my doubts) help Kerry defeat Bush. Yet the fact is we must deal now with Iraq. By the time Kerry gets in, if he does, the situation will either have brightened greatly or we may irretrievably be on our way out.
Finally, is it time for despair? Probably not yet. Remember that after the disastrous losses of American lives in April many commentators, including some of the nation's top defense intellectuals, thought we had lost. Their solution was simply to get out. But instead we started to reduce our presence on the streets without leaving, and the numbers of Americans killed dropped greatly in May. June may also be low. But what has changed is that now the danger is not so much American lives lost as Iraqi lives lost. It remains to be seen whether this challenge can be met. Let us give the situation another six weeks and then see how it's going.
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