Shadowland: No Way Out?

"It's clear the [American] intention has been to establish a protectorate," says W. Patrick Lang, formerly one of the Defense Intelligence Agency's top experts on the Middle East. A military like the one being organized in Iraq can't threaten its neighbors, to be sure, but it can't defend itself either--not even internally. The record in Fallujah makes that sadly apparent. The few thousand Iraqi government troops deployed there took a back seat while the Americans did all of the bombing, of course. And that will continue to be the case. The Americans also did most of the dying. At last count, eight Iraqi soldiers were killed in the same fighting that cost 51 Americans their lives.

So it's no wonder that many Iraqis--including the majority of the insurgents, who still see themselves as fighting foreign invaders--simply don't believe the American administration's spin about pulling out of Iraq sometime soon. Iraq's neighbors don't believe that either. And neither should anyone else.

© 2004