The Length Of The War, Civilian Casualties, & How The Useful Idiots Unwittingly Help Saddam

27 Mar, 2003 by John Hawkins

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The Length Of The War, Civilian Casualties, & How The Useful Idiots Unwittingly Help Saddam: I wish I could say I was surprised by the gloomy & pessimistic coverage of the war by much of the mainstream media, but it’s nothing new. We’re 8 days into the war and we’re already hearing a lot about “significant setbacks”, “Vietnam”, an Iraqi “quagmire”, and the supposedly horrible battleplan our military is using. On the other hand, the massive amounts of ground we’ve gained & the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties, desertions, & surrenders that have undoubtedly occurred within the first week of the war are being treated as losses of minimal significance for Saddam and company.

Just to give you a sense of perspective that the mainstream media isn’t providing right now, I thought it would be worthwhile to post some info about other recent conflicts from an editorial by Johnathan Last,

“Remember the Grenada cakewalk? The United States invaded on October 25, 1983 and hostilities ended on November 3. If conquering Grenada (133 square miles) took 10 days, shouldn’t commentators take a wait-and-see attitude towards Iraq (169,000 square miles)? The same was true for the invasion of Panama. Begun on December 20, 1989, Manuel Noriega didn’t surrender until January 3, 1990. That’s 15 days.

The first Gulf War was no easier. The allies began the air campaign on January 17, 1991 and didn’t reach a cease-fire until February 28–43 days. And if you back up a few months, Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. In an invasion that spent no time on the niceties of war which the United States insists upon, Saddam’s forces didn’t secure their small, militarily inferior neighbor until August 8. It took Saddam 7 days–and loads of civilian casualties–to conquer a neighbor with only 2.1 million people.

You say that’s ancient history, that we’re in a new era? Okay. How about this: In Afghanistan the United States started bombing on October 7, 2001. The last Taliban forces didn’t leave Kandahar until December 7–a 63 day campaign.

Today, each of these military actions is considered a rout and, with the exception of Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, each took longer than the 8 days which now seem to have been allotted to the allied commanders in charge of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Before this war started, the most optimistic estimates I heard suggested that it would take about three weeks for us to win the war. But, most “experts” were saying that it should be over in “weeks” as opposed to months. That means even if everything goes as expected (which is never a given), we may very well have another six weeks to go.

Last but not least, do keep in mind that this probably could be a “one week war” — if we were unconcerned about slaughtering Iraqi civilians near military targets of value. But, Saddam and his men understand certain things about the West better than many Westerners do, particularly the left-wingers who march in the streets thinking that Bush is another Hitler while ignoring the atrocities that Saddam’s men commit. While Coalition forces are taking great care to spare civilians, Saddam’s forces are not only using the Iraqi population as “human shields”, they’re deliberately trying to increase civilian casualties in the hopes that the anti-war crowd will become so incensed that they’ll force an early end to the war.

So ironically, Saddam’s regime will probably kill far more Iraqi civilians deliberately than Coalition forces will by accident, all in an effort to motivate the”peace protestors” to force us to pull out of Iraq, thereby leaving the people of Iraq in the hands of the man who intentionally had them slaughtered. That would almost be funny if it weren’t so tragic for the people of Iraq…