Geodog

Will Bush now destroy Baghdad to "save" it?

Christine Hauser reports in the NYT today:

Americans found themselves fighting intensely against two main segments of the population, using warplanes, attack helicopters and armored units against the groups the United States had said it came to liberate when it invaded war in March last year.

Pulitzer prize winning journalist Anthony Shadid filed this report from Baghdad in the Washington Post today:

"The Mahdi Army is the people," said Abu Raja Kinani, a tribal elder in the neighborhood, his voice exasperated. "They're the sons of all the city."

In a population caught between an occupier's armor and an indigenous guerrilla force, the full truth of Kinani's sloganeering is all but impossible to determine. Yet again and again in interviews Wednesday across the teeming slum of 2 million, residents repeated Kinani's formulation in words of their own.

Destroying the Mahdi Army, they said, might be possible only by destroying Sadr City.

"Of course we are all Mahdi Army," said Whalid Johi Minshid, 25, standing in the rubble of a rooftop pierced by a missile from an Apache attack helicopter near where Hashem was shot. "Because this is our belief, our religious leaders."

Resistance enjoys support of large portion of civilian population. Check.

Resistance is civilian by day, guerrilla by night? Check.

Resistance is fighting against a foreign occupier that claims support for democracy but is actually allied with corrupt elite? Check.

Sounds like a small country in South East Asia a generation ago, in another war where the political leadership of America involved America in a war overseas under false pretenses, and made the American military and the civilians of the occupied country pay the price for its lies.

We know how that ended -- not well for anyone, neither Americans or Vietnamese. And it sounds like we are on the same course again. Bush's incompetent arrogance is setting us up for another defeat.