The fantasy takes a hit

Perusing the news this morning…

“The BBC’s Paul Wood, embedded with the US Marines, says they believe that Falluja will be their biggest engagement since Hue, the Vietnamese city they captured in 1968, losing 142 men and killing thousands of the enemy.”

I’m inclined to think that when the Marines begin drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, we’re not in a good place. Apparently Iraq’s government thinks along the same lines since they’ve just declared a 60-day state of emergency for the entire country—excluding Kurdish areas in the north.

In the last day or so they’ve also seen:

• 21 Iraqi police officers shot to death at a police station in al-Anbar.
• 6 police shot to death in Haglaniya.
• 3 Iraqi officials assassinated on their way to a funeral for a colleague.
• 2 British Black Watch soldiers seriously injured in a suicide attack 20 miles outside of Baghdad.
• 1 American soldier killed, 4 wounded in a car bomb attack in western Baghdad.
• 1 Iraqi killed in a car bomb blast outside of Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s home, one of his guards.
• More than 30 people killed in Samarra, a town we recently claimed we regained control over.

Meanwhile, listening to a couple of retired generals on television news programs, it was hard not to pick up on their concern that since we’ve been telegraphing our intentions toward Falluja for the past week, if Zarqawi was there, he surely isn’t now—along with a large number of the other insurgents in the city.

But the tribal chiefs and Sunni Muslim clerics are still there. Oh good.

If things are going well in Iraq, I’d seriously not like to see what happens when things aren’t going well.