Quagmire? What WQuagmire?

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EI05Ak01.html

Quagmire? What quagmire?

By Daniel Smith

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)


In the months leading up to the war in Iraq and in its aftermath, Bush administration officials were forced to continually change their rationale for launching the attack to topple Saddam Hussein. Where they have not wavered, and where they have received consistent support from top Pentagon military commanders, is in their insistence that Iraq is not another Vietnam, not a quagmire. The further the US and the world move from the fall of Baghdad on April 9, the more it seems that the administration is correct: Iraq is not a quagmire. It is really a black hole.

A quagmire is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as (1) "Land with a soft, muddy surface" or (2) "A precarious or difficult situation". In either definition, circumstances are not irreversible. A "soft muddy surface" suggests something more solid somewhere beneath, while "difficult" is not the same as impossible.

But media reports the past week in August have made it very clear that the administration has plunged the US over the lip - what is called the "event horizon" - of the human and financial black hole that is post-war Iraq. The significance of passing the astronomical event horizon is that whatever crosses it, even light, cannot recover or be recovered. It is a one-way trip down a "tunnel" at whose end there is no light, only crushing gravity.

Consider the human costs of the Iraq adventure to date:

The US death toll from all causes since May 1, the date that President George W Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, now exceeds the death toll from the three weeks required to seize Baghdad (March 20-April 9) and the three weeks thereafter. The 286 US fatalities in the 2003 war is fast approaching the 293 killed in the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq.

The British lost four more soldiers in late August, ....

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