Helmintholog

I know I shouldn’t be writing about the war so much, but it’s less disgusting than the gay bishop story. And one really puzzling thing did happen this week: on Thuersday and Friday, there were numerous reports that a large number of American troops had been killed in two ambushes, including eight of them (I think that was the Independent‘s figure) in one incident near Khaldiyah. Here, for example, is the BBC:

Three US soldiers have been killed in an ambush near Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit, the latest in a continuing series of attacks on Americans in Iraq. Two soldiers were injured in a separate attack on a convoy in the town of Khaldiyah, west of Baghdad, with unconfirmed reports speaking of a number of men killed.

The source for this appears to have been eyewitness accounts from a carload of journalists which were also fired on by the Americans, and from the Iraqis who were standing around. The Telegraph announced the three American deaths had taken place in Khaldiyah:

Three American soldiers were killed yesterday in a new type of roadside ambush. A light lorry and a Humvee jeep were hit by a blast, possibly from a roadside bomb, on a busy road near Khaldiya, west of Baghdad. Then hidden attackers opened fire with machineguns on survivors trying to help the wounded.

The Times story, bylined from Khaldiya, and by the experienced Richard Lloyd Parry, found reports of eight dead quite credible, and talked about three destroyed US vehicles:

the Arab television station al-Arabiya reported that eight were killed, and eyewitnesses claimed as many as eighteen had been killed or wounded. Scores of local Iraqis were last night celebrating what could prove one of the deadlist attacks on coalition forces since combat officially ended on May 1.
They danced around the wreckage of at least three American military vehicles, fired Kalashnikov rifles in the air and brandished posters of Saddam Hussein. They chanted: “With our blood, with our souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam.”

Yet no deaths from this ambush have been officially acknowledged at all. The Bushies have got away with so many lies on so many subjects, that perhaps they believe that they can suppress the casualty figures. It’s also possible, of course, that they believe they have no choice because the truth unelectably too awful. Some reasons for this interpretation can be found in the extended entry, a very long quote from the almost infinitely longer Talking Points Memo interview with Joseph Wilson, a former American ambassador to Baghdad:

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If our armies are defeated, it must be the fault of the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the French …
Tom Friedman of the NYT has been the most useful liberal idiot for the Bush Administration all through this war. He is a straight up Blair-type liberal imperialist,who has argued again and again that the Arab world is yearning for a modern democracy brought to it on American bayonets. The new, Friedmanite Iraq will be “a beacon” to the rest of the Middle East. He imagines it will take about 20 years of benevolent American military occupation for the beacon to become properly inviting.

Now that this rather conspicuously isn’t happening, there has to be an explanation. Here it is, from yesterday’s NYT:

What is so amazing to me about the French campaign — “Operation America Must Fail” — is that France seems to have given no thought as to how this would affect France. Let me spell it out in simple English: if America is defeated in Iraq by a coalition of Saddamists and Islamists, radical Muslim groups — from Baghdad to the Muslim slums of Paris — will all be energized, and the forces of modernism and tolerance within these Muslim communities will be on the run. To think that France, with its large Muslim minority, where radicals are already gaining strength, would not see its own social fabric affected by this is fanciful. If France were serious, it would be using its influence within the European Union to assemble an army of 25,000 Eurotroops, and a $5 billion reconstruction package, and then saying to the Bush team: Here, we’re sincere about helping to rebuild Iraq, but now we want a real seat at the management table. Instead, the French have put out an ill-conceived proposal, just to show that they can be different, without any promise that even if America said yes Paris would make a meaningful contribution.

Let us try an alternative explanation for the French behaviour. It’s not perfidious; it’s realistic and based on common sense. The French do know, as we know, that an American defeat in Iraq will be bad news for Europe. Their memories of Algeria are rather better than American memories of Vietnam. The question is whether such a defeat can any longer be averted.

If it can’t be averted, the question becomes how to minimise its consequences.

If it can be averted, then we need to know how this is possible. No one has come up with any convincing suggestion. The one thing that’s abolutely clear is that it will require very large numbers of troops. The figure of 250,000 was mentioned by General Eric Shinseki before the war, (who was promptly sacked by Rumsfeld for his pains). It seems perfectly reasonable. That is about 100,000 more troops than are there at present. So putting in another 25,000, as Friedman suggests, is merely reinforcing failure. There’s a word for that in French. It’s Dien Bien Phu.

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