John Simpson (BBC): Iraq is no 'Vietnam' but much to be done

From the BBC Online
Dated Monday March 21

No "Vietnam" but much to be done
By John Simpson
BBC world affairs editor

In the first of his weekly columns for the BBC News website, John Simpson assesses the difficulties of achieving unity in post-Saddam Iraq.

It is a pretty much unbroken rule: wars never turn out as the people who plan them expect they will.

If you look back at the things which supporters of the invasion of Iraq said in March 2003, you will not find they predicted any of the following:

• that after two years, coalition soldiers would be dying at the rate of almost two a day, and Iraqi civilians at around 20 a day
• that the road between Baghdad and the airport would be probably the most dangerous stretch of ground in the world
• that in one of the world's great oil-producing countries, most Iraqis would have to buy their fuel on the black market because of shortages at the pumps
• that in some areas of the country, women would be forced to wear Islamic dress by gangs of religious extremists
• that a major international report would suggest that Iraq could see "the biggest corruption scandal in history".

Yet the invasion's opponents did not necessarily get it right either.

Read more.

"According to one senior American officer recently: "We can live with the kind of casualty levels we're getting."

What about the 100,000 dead Iraqis? Can the Islamic world live with that?

Don't blame Mr. Simpson for that. He's just the messenger.

Where I think Simpson's got it wrong is further down, were he calls the Shia forming the transitional government the coalition's "Iraqi allies". That's nonsense. The coalition's Iraqi allies got only 14% of the vote in the elections; the occupation was repudiated by those who voted.

The United Iraqi Alliance has a vision of a new Iraq that is Islamic republican and nationalist; Bush's vision was a mild authoritarianism (which he would call "democracy" and it would have some empty trappings of it) which would be more compliant with the needs of foreign capitalists than with those of the Iraqi people. The elections did not result in power for Bush's Iraqi allies; the elections were the Shias' expression of insurgency.

Mr. Simpson can be faulted also for not elaborating on the concerns of the Sunnis and exactly what it means. If Iraq were to degenerate into civil war between Sunnis and Shia, then Bush could use that a pretext to keep his troops in Iraq and give transnational corporations the cover to continue to loot the country.

Bush can live with a lot more than 100,000 Iraqi dead and a level of US dead similar to what it is now as long as those who have foot the bill for his political career get a return on their investment.

sure, Haliburton is but, what about the oil revenues they projected for funding the war? I've been watching BBC here in France and although it has more information that the M$M in the states, it still seems to be very right leaning.

Our 1500+ American dead, and all the other nations service people, and all that pesky "Collateral Damage" whilst winning Hearts and Minds.
We, the American taxpayers that is.

From down in that article:

" According to one senior American officer recently: "We can live with the kind of casualty levels we're getting.

...Even the cost to the US tax-payer - $4.7bn a month - is something the American economy can easily absorb. "


How low can they go?

Every parent and every spouse of every American soldier should see this.