Kwiatkowski on Iraqi Democracy

[reprehensor]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski70.html

by Karen Kwiatkowski

For a few horrified moments this week, the brutal visage of war gushed into American homes and offices. The anti-American violence in Fallujah and throughout the Anbar Province of Iraq has a face. It is a vaguely familiar face, reminding us of the mob brutality and frenzied hatred we saw for Americans in Mogadishu a decade ago.

We wondered why they hated us in Mogadishu. After all, we were only protecting the weak and distributing food. Then the Clinton Administration shifted policy to hunt down a certain clan leader who was agitating for political control. Warlord Mohamed Aidid became the human face of a new enemy in southern Somalia.

Recalling Mogadishu, the 1992–1993 Director of Operations General Anthony Zinni, in a late 2001 interview said, "…first of all, I think was ridiculous. Second of all, I think you were no longer in peace enforcement or peacekeeping. I mean, you were now in a counter-insurgency operation or in some form of war."

Indeed.

This week’s images from Iraq – atrocious, insistent, heartbreaking – remind others of Vietnam. We recall Walter Cronkite’s admission that even after our Tet victory, the war was unwinnable as early as February 1968. Those who study that war know that Cronkite’s opinion, for more salient reasons, was shared by many policymakers and soldiers. Yet it would be seven more bloody years, and would take over 30,000 more American soldiers returned to their homes of record to be buried by their parents and siblings and wives before we ended that misadventure.

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