US disbands ineffective Iraqi Fallouja force
The Iraqi military force formed by the Marines in a last-ditch effort to pacify the restive city of Fallouja has been disbanded in the face of continuing violence, assaults on government security forces and evidence that some members have been working openly with insurgents.
Translation: The US is losing the war, no doubt because they don’t understand, as in Vietnam, that attempting to “bomb them back to the Stone Age” will not win the war. Rumsfeld and the US military believe wars like this can be won solely from the air, by bombing. And clearly, this is not so. To win, they must fight on the ground, in the cities, block by block, and that would mean huge numbers of casualities, something the politicians can not allow to happen.
Why al-Qaeda is winning
Three years after September 11, President George W Bush’s crusade is a failure. “War on terror” is a meaningless myth: you can’t combat a supple attack machine like al-Qaeda with shock and awe. What should have been a long, meticulous police operation was turned by Bush - instigated by his foreign policy adviser, God - into an illegal, preemptive attack on a nation that had nothing to do with terror.
As nihilistic as it may be, al-Qaeda, from a business point of view, is a major success: three years after September 11, it is a global brand and a global movement. The Middle East, in this scenario, is just a regional base station. This global brand does not have much to do with Islam. But it has everything to do with the globalization of anti-imperialism. And the empire, whatever its definition, has its center in Washington. Bin Laden is laughing: Bush’s crusade has legitimized an obscure sect as a worldwide symbol of political revolt. How could bin Laden not vote for Bush?
Clouds
