Antiwar.com Blog

The US is issuing this face-saving statement:

The US-led coalition in Iraq has announced measures to end the military stand-off in the battle-scarred city of Falluja, west of Baghdad.

These include shortening the curfew and allowing unfettered humanitarian access to the people of Falluja.

Then they say they want the fighters in Fallujah to turn in their weapons. I’m sure they’ll get massive compliance on that one.

From the forthcoming issue of National Review:

Since the conclusion of the war, the Bush administration has shown a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations. The post-war looting was explained away as the natural and understandable exuberance of a newly-liberated people. (Now some Coalition officials suggest that a crackdown would have sped the reconstruction.) Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld denied the obvious reality of a guerrilla resistance and compared it to urban street crime in the United States. Every piece of good news has been hailed as turning the corner, even as the insurgency has remained stubbornly strong. …

Even if the administration had avoided these mistakes and made all moves correctly, it is still possible Iraq would be very messy. But this concession points to an intellectual mistake made prior to the occupation: an underestimation in general of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is fundamentally still a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny. This was largely, if not entirely, a Wilsonian mistake. The Wilsonian tendency has grown stronger in conservative foreign-policy thought in recent years, with both benefits (idealism should occupy an important place in American foreign policy, and almost always has) and drawbacks (as we have seen in Iraq, the world isn’t as malleable as some Wilsonians would have it).

Read every mind-boggling word of it. It would be hilarious if not for all the blood and viscera on these guys’ hands.

(Link courtesy of Marcus Epstein.)

Zapatero said he acted after deciding the United Nations was unprepared to take over the occupation of Iraq — his condition for keeping Spanish troops in the country.

Zapatero is right. There’s nothing the UN can do to end this debacle.

An editorial on the accused Marine (see also this and this) appears in today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune. A snippet:

The Marine Corps has investigated the matter, although it has yet to disclose its findings on the authenticity of the photo or its decision on whether to discipline Lance Cpl. Boudreaux.

His former commanding officer, Lt. Col. David Couvillon, has called the photo a stupid attempt at humor.

But the stunt wasn’t just stupid, it was also mean-spirited. Lance Cpl. Boudreaux may have intended to degrade the Iraqi people, but in truth, he embarrassed himself, the Marine Corps and, unfortunately, his home state [Louisiana].

Read the whole thing.

Warbloggers, I await your thoughts!

You’ve never been a regular reader of Matt Yglesias, either? Arthur Silber puts our minds at ease about the opportunity costs we’ve incurred.

Read Steve Gilliard’s assessment of the condition of US supply lines in Iraq. The situation is so bad the CPA is almost reduced to eating MRE’s.

The New York Times reports:

On Saturday, travelers heading north to Baghdad on the main highway from Kuwait saw at least three highway bridges destroyed in a 60-mile section immediately south of the capital. Munadel Abdul Ellah, 44, a Hilla resident who drove to Baghdad on Saturday, said large numbers of American helicopters flew overhead and hundreds of troops patrolled the roads.

“It’s a very bad situation,” said Mr. Ellah, who spent nearly eight hours making a round trip that usually takes only two hours. “There were so many troops on the highway. It was like when they first came to occupy the airport last year during the war.”

American forces had already effectively lost control of long sections of the 375-mile highway leading west from Baghdad to Jordan. The road runs through the battle zone around Falluja, 35 miles west of the capital. Ambushes near Falluja and the adjacent city of Abu Ghraib have destroyed numerous convoys carrying fuel and other supplies for American troops in the past two weeks.

The attacks have also resulted in the kidnapping of about two dozen foreigners, including an American soldier, Pfc. Keith Maupin, 20, who was shown Friday in a videotape released by his captors.

The announcement on Saturday of the the closing of the highways running north to Turkey and south to Kuwait was accompanied by an American military statement saying that the routes “are damaged and too dangerous for civilian travel,” and that anybody driving on the closed sections could be subject to attack. “If civilians drive on the closed sections of the highways, they may be engaged with deadly force,” the statement read.
[…]
The general said American military supplies were less of a problem because there were “alternative methods” of delivering ammunition, food and fuel, presumably by air. But even at the bases, commanders have been rationing use of critical stockpiles and urging decisive action to ensure that road convoys get through.

But a senior American official said Saturday that the cutoff in supplies reaching the American occupation authority’s headquarters in Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace in central Baghdad were approaching a critical point. Canteens feeding 2,000 people, civilians as well as military personnel, may soon be forced to serve combat rations in plastic sleeves, known as meals ready to eat.

“We’re getting back to where we were a year ago,” he said, referring to the privations that American civilian and military officials lived with during the early weeks after the invasion brought American troops to Baghdad on April 9, 2003.