Back to Work

To echo Timshel, this blog also lives. The time spent in New Iberia was good, though, as I visited with my family and cleared my head somewhat.

I took the time to check on something I'd suspected for a while, but hadn't confirmed--, yes, the local synagogue is literally located next door to The Hadrian Building, and I wonder how many locals realize the, um, irony.

Anyway, on the subject of irony, how this?

CHARD DUWAISH, Iraq, Nov. 28 - As marines aboard fast patrol boats roared up the Euphrates on a dawn raid on Sunday, images pressed in of another American war where troops moved up wide rivers on camouflaged boats, with machine-gunners nervously scanning riverbanks for the hidden enemy.

That war is rarely mentioned among the American troops in Iraq, many of whom were not yet born when the last American combat units withdrew from Vietnam more than 30 years ago. A war that America did not win is considered a bad talisman among those men and women, who privately admit to fears that this war could be lost.

But as an orange moon sank below the bulrushes on Sunday morning, thoughts of Vietnam were hard to avoid.

Marines waded ashore through soft silted mud that caused some to sink to their waists, M-16 rifles held skyward as others on solid land held out their rifle barrels as lifelines.

Ashore, sodden and with boots squelching mud, the troops began a five-hour tramp through dense palm groves and across paddies crisscrossed by deep irrigation canals.

There were snatches of dialogue from "Apocalypse Now," and a black joke from one marine about the landscape resembling "a Vietnam theme park."

John Burns continues to go both ways for his New York Times masters in the rest of his article, noting that US troops are teaming up with Iraqi commandos (many formerly employed as the equivalent of Green Berets by the Hussein regime)...which Burns calls a "qualified success" in one paragraph, before taking the time to record the less-than-stellar assessment by US ground forces in the rest of the story. Hmmm. John seems to be saying that, you know, the chicken shit DOES taste a little like chicken salad. Burns closes with an acknowledgement that the raid he accompanied was an unqualified failure--a hunt for weapons seized one shotgun and three Kalashnikovs--not exactly a backbreaker...

Speaking of which: Last week James Wolcott linked over to another excellent article by Lew Rockwell-type conservative William S. Lind (I'm still amazed at how the SCLM refuses to note dissatisfaction with the Bush regime FROM THE RIGHT). Lind has the correct response to claims that the Fallujah raid "broke the back" of the resistance: "Insurgencies, like octopi, are invertebrate."

Anyway, I've gotta get back to work over here (real work, as opposed to blogging, alas), but I'll have a few more things to note today, and expect to be back to normal posting, unless something comes up. I hope all y'all had decent holidays--now the real task of surviving the next four years begins in earnest.