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Thursday, November 11, 2004

Squeezing Jello

Yesterday, former UN weapons inspector and US Marine Scott Ritter wrote the following:
Far from facing off in a decisive battle against the resistance fighters, it seems the more Americans squeeze Falluja, the more the violence explodes elsewhere. It is exercises in futility, akin to squeezing jello. The more you try to get a grasp on the problem, the more it slips through your fingers.
Today, the NY Times' Edward Wong's report confirms what Ritter was saying:
Insurgents pressed attacks in the northern provincial capital of Mosul today, opening a major new front in the fighting, while American troops in Falluja began a push into the city's southern warrens, where an unknown number of guerrillas were believed to have barricaded themselves.

In Baghdad, a powerful suicide car bomb exploded on a busy commercial street this morning, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 30 others, police and hospital officials said. In the evening, explosions rippled across the capital with an intensity not seen here since August, when American soldiers fought a Shiite uprising in the south.

Violence surged through the so-called Sunni triangle in central Iraq, with ambushes, bombings and mortar attacks jolting Tikrit, Kirkuk, Hawija, Samarra and the provincial capital of Ramadi, 30 miles west of Falluja, which is 35 miles west of Baghdad.
Ritter concluded yesterday as follows:
It is a war the United States cannot win, and which the government of Iyad Allawi cannot survive. Unfortunately, since recent polls show that some 70% of the American people support the war in Iraq, it is a war that will rage until the American domestic political dynamic changes, and the tide of public opinion turns against the war.

Tragically, this means many more years of conflict in Iraq that will result in thousands more killed on both sides, and incomprehensible suffering for the people of Iraq, and unpredictable instability for the entire Middle East.
Since Ritter is one of the few people in the know who have been right about Iraq from the beginning, perhaps it is finally time for our "leaders" to start listening to him.