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I guess that was good enough for the suckers in Fresno, because nobody bothered to check out the disclaimer in the next day's USA Today -- "Iraqi insurgents, not foreign terrorists, overran the police headquarters here in an audacious daylight raid over the weekend, Iraqi police officials said in interviews Sunday -- the four dead and one wounded assailant all appeared to be Iraqi, police said. Lt. Col. Brian Drinkwine, who commands the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne battalion responsible for the city, said police were able to identify several of the attackers as local residents during the raid." These guys weren't just Iraqis, they were "local residents" so familiar to the Iraqi cops that they could identify the bodies on sight: "Oh yeah, that's Rashid, he works at the 7-11. And there's Hamid from the hardware store!" You can bet the four dead attackers are local legends by now. Families will be naming their kids after them, putting pictures of them on every wall. You can also bet they had little brothers who are just itching to pick up their dead brothers' RPG-7 launchers. Meaning this can go on and on. I keep coming back to the line an anonymous US officer told a reporter months ago: "You tell me how this ends, because I don.t see it ending ever." The more I checked out the Fallujah battle, the crazier the press coverage got. If you.re wondering why we left the cops to defend themselves, here's why, in a story from CNN last December:"The U.S. military has reduced its presence at a police station in the restive town of Fallujah, west of the Iraqi capital, a coalition spokesman said Friday. "The move is characterized as a step toward having Iraqis police themselves. "Calling it a 'positive step forward,' Maj. Sean Gibson said the 3rd Infantry Division was reducing its presence at one Fallujah police station from 30 to six people. "He said Iraqi police in the city -- the site of frequent unrest and attacks against U.S. troops -- had told U.S. military officials that they could handle a greater share of policing duties.
"Iraqi police also had complained to U.S. troops that their presence was endangering Iraqi police." That's what happened: we started believing our own lies so much we actually stripped our troops from the most dangerous city in Iraq because Bush & co. were more interested in making their phony Vietnamization program look like it was working than actually keeping the situation under control. Another hard lesson from the story is in that last line I quoted: "Iraqi police also had complained to US troops that their presence was endangering Iraqi police." That's how much we're loved, people. So much that the Iraqi cops were begging us to get the Hell away from them because we draw too much fire. If we'd listened to them fast enough, it might've worked. Beat Saddam's army, then vanish and let the locals get the glory. Instead we did the worst of both worlds: stuck around pissing off the locals til they were ready to die for the chance to take a few of us with them, then left our poor scared local ARVN types on their lonesome. Which is why they got their asses kicked for them last week.I tried explaining some of this in the coffee room at work, but nobody wanted to know. The guys were all tough about it and one of the secretaries said, .Well, at least there hasn't been another 9/11 since we went in there!. I told her the joke about the elephant repellent, but she didn't get it. I'll try it on you, see if you get the point: Somebody asks this guy why he keeps spraying himself with this smelly gunk, and he says, "It's elephant repellent." The other guy says, "But there.re no elephants around here!" The guy with the spray says, "Yeah.the stuff really works." So, Joe, those are my thoughts. One last thought: '.m a patriot, not a sucker. Some of you guys out there need to learn the difference.
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