MAUREEN DOWD: Iraq Becomes "Ransom of Red Chief"

The Captors Become the Captives
By MAUREEN DOWD
The New York Times
Published: May 3, 2006


Bill and Sam are fugitives lurking in a small town in Alabama who kidnap a prominent citizen's child and ask for a ransom of $1,500. But once he is held in a nearby cave, the freckle-faced, red-haired boy turns out to be such a terror as he happily plays a violent Indian named Red Chief -- attacking Bill and Sam with bricks, kicks, rocks, bites, a knife, a slingshot and a hot boiled potato -- that he breaks the kidnappers' spirit.

The tormentors become the tormented, dragging the reluctant Red Chief back to his affluent father, who refuses to take the problem child until Bill and Sam cough up $250.

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Now we see this classic plotline in the Middle East. The inept captors have become the captives. The country the administration precipitously grabbed and overconfidently took over has ended up trapping, draining, flummoxing and alarming the administration, which is more and more desperate to hand it off and escape.

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But even if they and their 33 percent unshakeable base are still in denial, there's a growing consensus that their plot was hatched, as O. Henry put it, "during a moment of temporary mental apparition" and that we're the Middle East hostages now, to war and oil.

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