Apt Metaphor

Last night I tuned in Nightline and watched George Stephanopoulos, the Keanu Reeves of journalism, introduce a report by Mike Cerre on the return of Marine Company Fox 2/5 to the war zone.

Unlike the first time around, the second act for this Company is decidedly less glamorous. One Marine compared the initial assault to the moon landings--and he was a lot more on the money than maybe he realized. I forget the exact quote, but it was something like how he felt like the first man on the moon. Now, less than two years later, the Marine company, and the others there, might well be like the last to walk on the lunar surface, while public interest drifts to other things.

As for the rest of us--well, I think it's clear that any Westerner would be suicidally foolish to venture to the cradle of Western civilization in my lifetime.

The rest of the report focused on the usual stuff--the house to house searches that make a mockery of any sort of liberating aspect of the war. There were a couple of cutesy references to "Monster Garage" and "Pimp my Ride" about the frantic armoring of vehicles (making the trucks and Humvees look like props in the old sci-fi TV show War of the Worlds). Cerre himself noted the disaffection of especially younger soldiers, who are beginning to realize they might spend their entire career in the hellhole of the West Asian desert. And, in spite of the enormous sums of money spent thus far, it's looking more and more like the war was provisioned by Wal-Mart--bad or missing equipment, too few boots on the ground, etc. etc. One especially poignant segment of the report focused on a "good will" mission--undertaken only after two months or so of smashing down doors. Marines distributed tennis shoes to Iraqi children, after having set up a perimeter that included rooftop snipers (of course, doors were smashed in order to position the snipers). Off in the margins, disaffected young men watched, wearing the kinds of expressions found on gangbangers here in the US.

The real situation on the ground continues to LOL at the public statements the Bush administration made prior to the catastrophic success. Oyster has a very good post reminding us of the glowing rhetoric, coupled with a most sobering estimate of the actual insurgency faced by the soldiers. Then we've got today's news--Baghdad's governor assassinated, five more US soldiers killed, insurgent rhetoric every bit as insane as bin Laden's...This is success?

Meanwhile, public opinion is either drifting, in denial, or prone to sinking its collective head in the sand when it comes to the Bush manufactured disaster in Mesopotamia (see The Rude Pundit today for more on the latter). Like the moon landings, it's difficult to discern any sort of benefit from the operation. The downside seen here in the US--the funerals for the soldiers killed--has a chilling effect, even if the destruction wrought upon ordinary Iraqis is mostly ignored.

And the REAL downside to the loss hasn't even been felt yet.