Not-so-green Zone

There’s been an attack on the Iraqi parliament in the Green Zone:

At least two members of the Iraqi government have been killed in a suspected suicide bomb attack inside the Iraqi parliament, within Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone.

Unconfirmed reports say a third person has died.

Other eyewitness reports suggest that up to six people may have been killed.

The explosion has been described as a blatant security breach in the third month of the US-Iraqi crackdown on violence in the capital.

As well as the parliament building, the complex also houses the British consulate.

Dozens of people were injured – some critically – as the blast tore through a cafeteria while lawmakers were eating lunch.

Fester at NewsHog has an outstanding analysis of the implications of the attack to which I doubt I can add anything.

There’s also a rather disquieting op-ed from John Dillin, former managing editor of the Christian Science Monitor. The op-ed concludes:

America and Britain didn’t win WWII by building playgrounds and schools and setting up local governments. They won by pounding the other side into dust. As American Gen. George Patton once said, “Nobody ever defended anything successfully; there is only attack and attack and attack some more.” Rebuilding comes later.

Many Americans say we should never have attacked Iraq in the first place. Afghanistan is where the real enemy was. It’s an argument historians will have to settle. But the piecemeal way this Iraq war has been fought has added to the injury on all sides.

Perhaps the message to Mr. Bush, Congress, and the American people should be: If this fight is worth doing, if America truly has an unquestionable moral imperative to win, then wage it with everything you’ve got. Otherwise, why is America there?

That America very obviously didn’t have the will or intent to fight that sort of war was fundamental to my disagreement with the initial invasion.

12 comments… add one
  • Dave — Again thanks for the praise and the link. I think that the bridge attack is more interesting and ominous than a successful assassination attempt as attacks against MPs and senior bureaucrats and fiefdom defenders are common, while dis-connectivity attacks against physical infrastructure are fairly rare.

    Fester

  • You’re welcome, Dave, and agreed. I wonder about the tactical significance of the bridge, too, particularly whether the absence of the bridge will tend to funnel police, army, etc. responders to particular routes.

  • I take your point that we didn’t have the will in 2003 — subsequent events leave little doubt about that. But do you maintain that even a serious, bipartisan effort by the administration would necessarily have failed to raise the degree of committment? The president was polling in the mid-50’s at least and the degree of partisan rancor was somewhat lower. I persist in believing that a call for sacrifice would have been answered. Had the president leveled with us, had he announced clear goals, had he warned that we had to go all-in, had he called for half a million additional volunteers, and had he later demonsrated seriousness by dismissing incompetent subordinates, I wonder if things might have gone very diferently.

  • It’s possible. Barely. But I also didn’t see this administration as being willing or able to make such an effort.

  • Ken Hoop Link

    Sacrifice for who Takhullus? Buchanan had already before the war exposed the cherrypicked intelligence collected by Israel’s fifth column in America. Scott Ritter had already said there were no WMDs left in Iraq.
    A serious effort by the Democrat hierarchy to obey the will of their
    80% anti-war base would have checkmated the neocons. A serious attempt by the MSM to expose the lies would have saved 3,000 plus
    American lives and 650,O00 Iraqi innocents.

    What you propose would have put America into an earlier Vietnam
    War polarization -as Iraqis will not allow their nation to be transformed into a US/Israeli puppet, no matter what Feith ,Perle and Wolfowitz
    wished and predicted.

  • Jews, Jews and more Jews, eh Ken? Will it be enough for us to abandon the Jews in Israel or will we have to march them into the ovens ourselves to make you happy?

  • I think that it would have been easy to get Americans in for the long fight at two separate points: right after 9/11, and right before the invasion of Iraq. However, there is considerable evidence that the President wanted Americans disengaged from the war. Why is arguable; I assume that he was going on the misguided assumption that if we were complacently going about our lives, we wouldn’t be terrorized. He missed that point that terror is a defense mechanism, which is a pretty good thing to have when you’re under attack.

    So the President laid out, repeatedly, the need for a generational conflict, and then utterly failed to prepare the military, the government at large, or the public for it. We are seeing the payback for that failure now. That, not anything done or not done in Iraq itself, is why the public is by and large pulling support from the President.

    But I think that there’s a third chance coming up, and it won’t even take losing a city in the US or Europe for it to happen. In 2008, we will have a presidential campaign. If a leader of real stature and charisma stands up, and says forthrightly what we have to do, and how we have to do it, and why the anti-war crowd is missing the boat entirely (hint: war may be interested in us) so that Iraq, flawed though it was, still has to be won and we have other chores — and other, greater sacrifices — ahead of us, I believe that Americans by and large would flock to that leader.

    We are, as a polis, hungry for meaning and nobility, and the person who can bring us that can command enough loyalty to change our direction and ready us for the long fight. (Which, believe me, is way better for the world at large than if we have to fight the war quickly.) I had thought Hillary Clinton and John McCain the most likely leaders with that ability, but Clinton seems to be backing away as fast as she can, under pressure from the Left, from supporting the war (I probably should have more easily remembered how poll-driven the Clintons are); and McCain will be destroyed by the media for being a Republican, and ignored by the Republicans because of his past sins, including McCain-Feingold. Fred Thompson might have the ability; so might Rudy Giuliani; so might Newt Gingrich, though I doubt it. Frankly, I’m pessimistic, and think we’ll end up fighting a short war instead of a long war, but I am still hopeful that I am wrong.

  • I don’t often say this, but the Dillin op-ed is the stupidest thing I’ve read in a while.

  • Fletcher Christian Link

    The birds will fly sooner or later; why not now?

    Just think what the trillion dollars could have bought – energy independence, massive amounts of resources from a place where no extremist nutters can benefit, living space (eventually) for trillions, a well in every Third World village…

    Instead, what have the trillion dollars, and the lives, bought? A square mile or so in a fleabitten pesthole, surrounded by people that hate us, and the undying emnity (or an increase in it) of a quarter of the world. And a few thousand holes in a desert.

    What should we have done, given the (non-existent) WMDs? Simple. Destroy every bridge, power station, factory, government office, dam, sewage treatment facility, road junction, airport, seaport and anything else that lets a modern society work. Seal the borders. Leave. Let the barbarians live in the Dark Ages as they wish – forever.

    Now, instead of that, the civilised West is going to have to kill them all, instead. The only trouble is that a few million members of civilisation are going to die before the barbarians do.

  • I think you’re overly optimistic, Jeff (if that’s the right word for it). America was united as long as it was a victim. As soon as the invasion of Afghanistan began that was over. Evidence of this has been provided by Marc Schulman of American Future in his excellent series of posts tracing the evolution of the editorial policy of the New York Times on the subject.

    As Marc shows by December 2001 the window had closed, partially in anticipation of the midterm elections.

    As to following the invasion of Iraq I think it’s quite apparent that the Bush Administration didn’t see the support that you do. I think that the moves following the fall of Baghdad demonstrate an Administration convinced that U. S. casualties constituted political doom.

  • Ken Hoop Link

    Get over it Takhullus. Washington in his “Farewell Address” condemned
    “entangling alliances” as the greatest threat to America, and you Zionist fellow travellers who ignore Mearsheimer and Walt’s expose of who runs our Mideast policy ,would repulse the Father of our Country.

  • Ken:

    You’re an anti-semite. But I think the one question we all have is this: are you of the Nazi stripe of anti-semite or the Islamist type of anti-semite. Give us a few minutes to put down our bets before you do the big reveal.

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