Mission Accomplished....indeed:
A series of sustained counterinsurgency operations by US troops has signaled a new stage in the US occupation of Iraq. Faced with escalating armed resistance and growing hostility from the Iraqi people, Washington has decided to use overwhelming force to suppress and terrorize the country’s 24 million people.
A war that was waged under the pretense of destroying fictitious “weapons of mass destruction” is evolving into a classical colonial-style war of repression, the kind that has been waged with bloody results from the US campaign in the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century, to the French bloodbath in Algeria beginning in the 1950s, to the US war in Vietnam.
Six weeks after President Bush strutted across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and proclaimed that major combat operations had ended and the military mission had been accomplished, American soldiers are being killed by Iraqis at the rate of one a day. Iraqi casualties over the same period have climbed to several hundred.
The latest American death, the shooting of a soldier patrolling Baghdad Tuesday, brings to 50 the number of occupation troops killed in attacks or accidents since Bush utilized the aircraft carrier for a photo opportunity.
Beyond the daily guerrilla attacks on US troops, there are a number of other telling indications of the mounting resistance to the occupation. Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East reporter for the Independent in Britain, said US officials had told him that aircraft seeking to land at Baghdad airport come under fire from snipers hiding near the runway virtually every night.
Didn't the US announce this week that three different airlines have signed deals to begin service to Baghdad? As much as I like getting frequent flyer miles, I think I'm gonna wait.......
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