Through the looking glass It seems ...

Via Juan Cole:

Now it is being argued that it is necessary to kill hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians in Fallujah, in order to "save" them from a handful of foreign guerrillas. But every evidence is that most Fallujans support the uprising against the Americans, and the evidence for any significant number of foreign fighters being in Iraq is thin. Can it really be necessary to destroy a city to get at 200 foreign volunteers? So what is really probably being argued is that it is necessary to kill hundreds or thousands of Fallujans in order to remove a challenge to Mr. Allawi and his colleagues.

As Annan implies, the argument that Fallujah has to be razed in order to prepare the way for elections makes no sense. The US attack on Fallujah may well push most Sunni Arabs, who identify with the Fallujans, into boycotting the January elections, thus profoundly weakening the legitimacy of the new elected government.

Many prominent Iraqi political figures are deeply critical of the US tendency to use massive force in Iraq.

Who will be next? And how many Americans will have to die to accomplish these increasingly brutal and absurd missions? Is it really hoped that the ghetto Shiites of Sadr City can be bombed into accepting Thomas Jefferson? And what exactly did the United States expect to find in Fallujah, if not Baathists and Sunni fundamentalists?

If the Kurds don't get what they want, and start making trouble, will the Allawi government or its successor then argue that dozens of Marines must die fighting the Peshmerga, and must kill hundreds or thousands of Kurds?

Isn't that where we came in?

Posted by Jason at November 6, 2004 09:01 AM