Ruminatrix
...more recent posts
Friday, Mar 21, 2003
It is now the second full day of the War in Iraq. I had to turn off the radio to get things done -- and forget about watching TV with its endless crawls and repeated video snippets. But it keeps pulling me back. I don't know how agonist files recaps three times a day, filtering dozens of sources. Must be out of his mind.
To triangulate from reliable sources, the least fanciful reports suggest that Allied troops have a) encircled the Faw peninsula and taken the port of Um Qasr, just across the border from Kuwait and b) started to move up past to the west of Basra. There's been very little resistance so far. Rumors about what's happening in the north of Iraq are of the "Special Forces Seize Oilfields" variety and not very credible. So will the Turkish Army move into the Mosul area, as the Ankara Parliament authorized them to do yesterday? Are any reporters filing from Southern Turkey?
There are hints of how disorganized and confused Iraqi resistance has been so far. A BBC radio correspondent -- I didn't catch his name -- described seeing astonished civilians driving near Basra who didn't know the war had begun. The night-time images of burning government buildings in Baghdad show all the streetlights turned on, as if they hadn't had time even to organize a blackout.
As far as we know (?), loss of life has probably been low so far. The siege of Baghdad is likely to be a different matter, as civilians and army units (of both sides) will be right on top of one another. Throughout history, sieges of cities have always been much worse for non-combatants than fighting "in the field." The aerial bombardment of cities, pioneered in the Spanish Civil War, has only made it worse. So-called precision weapons don't work at all in rubble. Will we see a humanitarian crisis with thousands of homeless refugees and injured? What's the plan for preventing the sort of vigilante revenge-killing we saw at the fall of Ceaucescu in Roumania in 1989?
But the whole world is watching and it doesn't necessarily interpret what it sees the same way as we do. Even if Americans lose interest once victory is declared, that won't be the case elsewhere.