Newsweek: Why Iraq is (could be) worse than Vietnam

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0725-01.htm

Published on Friday, July 25, 2003 by Newsweek
Body Counts
Uday and Qusay’s deaths will not stop the guerrilla war. Why Iraq could be worse than Vietnam

by Christopher Dickey

Those of us who’ve covered the Third World’s wars are used to looking at mugshots of the dead, whole photo albums of corpses.

SOME HUMAN-RIGHTS organizations collect them to show the brutally murdered victims of evil dictators. Some generals collect them (I’m thinking of a Turkish general in particular) to show, body by body, their victories over elusive guerrillas. And sometimes the victims in one collection and the guerrillas in the other are the same. That’s the problem with counterinsurgency: separating “the innocent” from “the enemy.”

The new photographs of Saddam Hussein’s sons—close-ups of bearded faces on bloody plastic—look pretty much like any other cadavers dragged out of a firefight, and better than many. Uday’s face was twisted from a wound slashing across the nose, but not imploded beyond recognition, as such faces often are. Qusay’s was unscarred, grimacing.

For American forces these were all but the baddest of the bad guys. For most Iraqis, they were a bad dream that seemed never to end. No question of innocents here. Uday and Qusay were the enemy, full stop, and when they died, so did even the remotest chance in hell of a Saddamite dynasty.


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