Iraqi guerillas fire opening salvo

It's about as official as these things get: Iraq's opposition forces, formerly in disarray following the dominant US victory, are now fighting back.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed and others wounded in Iraqi ambushes and an explosion on Monday [...]

Gunmen fired machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment near Haditha, 110 miles northwest of Baghdad, a U.S. statement said.

Hours later, an explosion ripped through a U.S. military convoy on the outskirts of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding three others and destroying their Humvee military car.

"They deserved it and they deserve more. They are occupiers, not liberators," said Ali Abbas, a resident of the Amiriyah area in western Baghdad.

There were two additional attacks, marking a coordinated "wake up" call to US occupying forces.

We have suffered deaths at the rate of one a day since the "end" of the war. It's true that most of those dead (and injured) are accidental, and not from combat operations. But dead is dead -- regardless of cause, and staging a military occupation of a hostile nation is dangerous business. I'd wager that none of those dead would have suffered a similar fate had they been back in Georgia or Texas.

And in any case, if the latest spate of attacks are any indication (and I'd wager that they are), our casualty rates are about to move much higher. (Add up both the attacks and accidents, and four US soldiers died, and six other wounded yesterday.)

And for what? To make the world safer against Iraqi WMDs? We've seen this LIE vividly exposed. To free the Iraqi people from a brutal tyrant? We did, but by allying ourselves with some of the most brutal tyrants in the world (Uzbekistan, Ethopia, Eritria, and -- dare I say it? Saudi Arabia). To bring Democracy to the region? No one in the administration is even pretending this will work anymore.

So what has Bush accomplished, with this, the most phyrric of "victories"?

Posted May 27, 2003 12:20 AM | Comments (98)