HNN Poll: Are We at a Turning Point in Iraq?
Do we have to wait another day before some official completes this picture by using the phrase "the light at the end of the tunnel"? Here's the sort of statement that's already coming out of the mouth of the Coalition Provisional Authoritys L. Paul Bremer:
'There is no question we have control over the country. I know if you just report on those few places [where the fighting is taking place], it does look chaotic,' Bremer said on CNN's American Morning. 'But if you travel around the country, what you find is a bustling economy, people opening businesses right and left, unemployment has dropped The story of the house that doesn't burn down is not much of a story in the news. The story of the house that does burn down is news.
So is Iraq -- yes, we're talking about Iraq, not Vietnam -- a glass half full or half empty? Or could it be half-shattered or is it a glass at all?
Soon enough we'll undoubtedly hear plaintive murmurings from official Washington that "they" -- the Sunni insurgents in that famed "triangle" (reminiscent of "triangles" first named decades ago); and the followers of the young Islamist extremist Muqtada al Sadr -- have been militarily "defeated" and should recognize as much and act accordingly. As if that were the point. As if the story were really a military one in the first place.
For anyone of a certain age, memories -- particularly of the shocking beginning moment of the surprise 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam -- are bound to come flooding back; not, I hasten to add, because that massive nationwide series of assaults which stunned the American public into disbelief and this chaotic spread of rebellion into the Shiite areas of Iraq are in any literal way similar, but because the response is familiar, because the "gap" between events unfolding on television and the Iraq promised by this administration is already large enough to create genuine unease in the "homeland," to give the alternately sunny and belligerent pronouncements of this administrations spokesmen in Baghdad and Washington the look of propaganda, not to say surreality.
In the Vietnam years, at least, our government had a series of military regimes,
however shaky, to back in South Vietnam (even if we had largely put them in
place). Iraq, on the other hand, is like a strange administrative void at the
moment. Under other circumstances, an American administration would simply have
backed a military strongman or junta of some sort. But this is now inconceivable.
With every other announced explanation for the invasion of Iraq from weapons
of mass destruction to al-Qaeda links down the tubes, this administration has
nothing left but the idea that its bringing "democracy" to the
country. Lose that and what is there except dreams, greed, and disaster.