Marines Battling in Streets of Nasiriya

By Sam Felder on March 25, 2003 11:01 AM | | Comments (0)

"It's not pretty," Chief Warrant Officer Pat Woellhof said. "It's not surgical." "You try to limit collateral damage, but they want to fight," he said. "Now it's just smash-mouth football."

This front page New York Times article today reflects the profound inability, or unwillingness, of Washington planners to understand what a war in Iraq would look like. The prospect of villagers cheering in the streets has turned out to be a fantasy even in the south where the population was supposed to be most sympathetic. We have already begun the process of alienating those Iraqi's who would have been sympathetic. As one man put it "If they want to go to Baghdad, that's one thing, but now they have come into our cities, and all Iraqis will fight them."

Our war in Iraq is turning out to much worse than anyone imagined. I hope that all this talk of it being short will come to something. American, British, and Australian young men and women need to come home and hold their governments accountable for their dead comrades and the Iraqi's they have been made to kill. I think of the time that I went with my father, who was active in the 1960's movement to stop our involvement in Vietnam, to find the names of his boyhood friends on the Vietnam memorial. War is hell and this one is turning out to be no exception.

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Sam Felder is a web designer and occasional writer in Los Angeles, CA.

Born in Washington, DC, Sam and his family moved to Peoria, IL, where he grew up and went to school. He returned to DC in 2003 and left for the west coast in late 2005.

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