Baghdad Babylon: Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News
The upshot of it is that things in Iraq while far from rosy are less bad than they are generally thought to be:
Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear...The Americans may or may not have turned things around. If this report is right there is hope that they might have. And if that is the case then it is worth struggling on. It reminds me of Napoleon's saying '...never despair while there remain brave men around the colors.' It sounds corny I know, but there it is. To much of contemporary society words such as 'honor and glory of arms' sound anachronistic or even oxymoronic. We're much more likely to recall Sherman's 'I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine.' But the fact is they matter as much today as ever. The likely consequences of our withdrawal in defeat from Iraq for Iraqis are bad enough, but it would be a huge setback in the wider conflict which would have knock-on effects most immediately in Afghanistan. Which looks worse than Iraq to judge from the words of Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie 'NATO Countries are Shirking' and British casualty figures reported in The Times Britain’s frontline soldiers have 1 in 36 chance of dying on Afghan battlefield.
No comments:
Post a Comment