Silver lining
The news that Iraq has begun to use suicide bombers is indeed terrible, but every dark cloud has a silver lining, however small. In this case, it is Heath Gibson’s entertaining observation:
There are conflicting reports of the damage caused by the bombing. The US/UK version is “A US official said a car exploded at a checkpoint near the Shi’ite Muslim shrine city of Najaf, about 160km south of Baghdad, killing four soldiers who were searching it. The driver also died in the blast.”
The Iraqi version is “the attack had killed 11 American soldiers and destroyed two tanks and two armoured personnel carriers. ”
Now unless they packed this car with something very unconventional, well, I think it should be fairly obvious who is stretching the truth the most here.
Unless of course you are John Quiggin, who thinks the Iraqi government has been generally far more truthful on a whole host of occasions than America, Britain or Australia.
oh WOW! I would love to know what they packed into that car to make it destory two (2) Tanks, presumably American M1A2’s, and two (2) APC, but they could have been anything, but most likely Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
Must have used a small thermonuclear device, or possibly The Force.
They expected waving flags, and a warm reception, instead they got some resistance which they never expected.
4-5 weeks into Gulf War I, commentators were telling us all was not going well. They began this wail much sooner this time.
It will be interesting to see how may of these latter day (hopelessly wrong) Jerimiahs, eventually acknowledge they completely undertated Gulf War II’s effectiveness?
Oh, you mean that Gulf War after which thousands of Shiites died under Saddam’s reprisal, and 100,000 veterans get strange ailments because of all the depleted uranium rounds? Or the Gulf War where Iraqi civilians who needlessly died because we bombed the wrong bunkers, thanks to our piss-poor intelligence; the war that was immediately followed by a recession?
I’m sure we’ll find yet again what one journalist pundit was musing about our involvement in Kosovo: Marines are extremely good at attacking, and very bad at occupying. We’ll see what happens when we can’t just “pull out.”
Hopefully, there’s only one person who can’t understand the point I was making?
Your point was painfully clear, as far as unfounded rhetoric goes. It was particularly vague (what complaints, specifically? A lot of stuff happened wrong during and after that war), logically false (isn’t saying that all war naysayers are wrong because of one conflict a gross and misleading generalization?), and is comparing apples and oranges (we were in the defending role last time, now we’re in the offensive, and will have to occupy the country as well for a time.)
Didn’t you ever take debate in school?