Don’t Panic! July 10 2003
Your war questions answered
Who’s responsible for all of the attacks on Americans and Brits in Iraq?
At a recent White House press conference, President Bush went all WWE on them Iraqis by daring the ones who want to attack U.S. soldiers to “Bring ‘em on!” Thems was awfully courageous words from a man who gots himself an entire government agency devoted to his personal protection. Heck, if that tough talk don’t scare them Iraqis off, maybe we should threaten to have Bo and Luke drive out there in the General Lee and shoot some dynamite arrows at ‘em. I reckon Mr. Dubya’s workin’ on that now.
Since President “Bring ‘Em On” announced the end of major combat operations on May 1, Iraqis have brought it on to the tune of 64 dead American soldiers. On the day of the speech itself, six U.S. soldiers were wounded in two separate incidents in Iraq.
The White House and Pentagon attribute many of the attacks on U.S. soldiers to remnants of Saddam’s Ba’ath Pa’arty and the Republican Guard. Like aging ball players who refuse to hang up their jerseys, these fellas refuse to recognize that their best days are behind them and that if they want to live in a ruthless Arab dictatorship, they’re gonna have to move next door to Syria. Many have apparently organized into small guerilla groups in order to take deadly pot shots with small arms and rocket propelled grenades at American soldiers. They can’t defeat our military in battle, but their goal is clearly to kill enough Americans that we throw up our hands in the air (like we just don’t care) and leave.
Because it’ll be much less fun being a Saddam loyalist when he’s dead or captured, we’ve stepped up our efforts to catch the mustachioed one. Our thinking is that, with no Saddam to fight for, the attacks will abate. To speed that process along, we just announced a $25 million reward for Saddam’s capture. You compulsive gamblers out there might know him better as the Ace of Spades. We also put out a $15 million bounty for Saddam’s son’s Uday and Qusay. Rumor has it though that American soldiers have been ordered not to harm Uday so that Jeb Bush will have a compelling foreign bogeyman to distract us with when he’s president.
Unfortunately, Saddam and his loyalists aren’t the only ones pissed off at the occupying forces. We’re having serious problems with Iraq’s shi’ites. Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has called our plan to appoint Iraq’s constitution-drafting committee “fundamentally unacceptable” because he fears that a U.S.-appointed committee won’t be committed to the best interests of Iraqis. We consider Sistani to be a moderate, a code-word meaning “someone we think we can deal with.” If he starts speaking out against us, we’re gonna have an even bigger problem keeping the peace.
In Falluja, the city’s Arab Street (the same one apparently that thinks that Israel committed the 9-11 attacks) blames us for a recent explosion at a mosque that killed six people, including one of the mosque’s leaders. We deny it, but nevertheless angry mobs are now screaming and yelling in some weird foreign language about how they wanna kill lots of Americans.
The deadliest example of non-Saddamite resistance happened near Basra recently. Villagers from Majar al-Kabir fired on British forces in anger after the Brits supposedly broke an agreement with them by searching their village for weapons. The British returned fire, killing four Iraqis and wounding 17. A large mob then hunted down the British forces, killing six of them. The Iraqis involved are Shi’ite who were brutally oppressed by Saddam’s regime. Nevertheless, the “you got us, now we gonna get you” tribal justice mentality supercedes any gratefulness they might have felt for us for ousting Saddam.
These sorts of incidents are bound to increase the longer we stay there. The more targeted that American and British soldiers feel, the more prone they’ll be to fire first and ask questions later. That in turn, will lead to more attacks on our soldiers. That there is what them folks in the newspapers and the TV call a “cycle of violence.” Hey, bring ‘em on!