reading all these articles about the seemingly endless violence in iraq, i keep wondering if we've lost. then i wonder how we will know if we have. maybe we can only know in retrospect.
meanwhile the babbling commentators and administration apologists keep talking about how we turned a corner after fallujah. but how do they know that? maybe we turned a corner into a dead end?
the turn the corner folks don't really have much credibility anyway. they've been seeing corners since the start. back before saddam hussein was captured, the official story was that the insurgents (or "dead enders" as they were known in those days) would realize the futulity of their fight and stop. but instead the violence continued, and the know-it-all commentators never seemed to apologize for getting it wrong. instead they adopted official story 2.0: that the violence would decrease after "sovereignty" was handed over on june 30th. but then came july 1st and the violence didn't stop. again, no apologies. first the claim that the violence was a post-handover temporary surge. but the "surge" never really ended, only the claims that it was temporary.
the violence keeps increasing in iraq and the goal post quietly slides backwards again. this time the magic date is the election in january. just as pre-saddam's capture the violence was portrayed as the outburst of people who haven't caught up to reality, all the violence these days is framed in terms of attempts to disrupt the elections. maybe that is what it is about, i'm just having a hard time believing stories that shift around so much. no one seems to be questioning the explanation on the news though. the people on t.v. seem take it as a given that all the violence, all of it, is to disrupt the election. but how do they know? there is the embarrassing fact that the insurgency existed before the elections were scheduled. how could they possibly know it will end after?
inquiring minds wanna know.
