Sow, Reap

Two from Steve Gilliard--the first, an account of some of the fighting in Anbar Province, i.e., Iraq's empty quarter, which shows just as much resistance as Baghdad--or more:

JARAMI, Iraq, May 10 - Screaming "Allahu Akbar'' to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade.

Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, the foreign fighters battled on, their screaming voices gradually fading to just one. In the end, it took five Marine assaults, grenades, a tank firing bunker-busting artillery rounds, 500-pound bombs unleashed by an F/A-18 attack plane and a point-blank attack by a rocket launcher to quell them.

The Marines got their fallen man, suffering one more dead and at least five wounded in the process. And according to survivors of the battle, the foreign fighters near the Syrian border proved to be everything their reputation had suggested: fierce, determined and lethal to the last.

And, over in Afghanistan:

JALALABAD, Afghanistan - Shouting "Death to America!" more than 1,000 demonstrators rioted and threw stones at a U.S. military convoy Wednesday, as protests spread to four Afghan provinces over a report that interrogators desecrated Islam's holy book at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Police fired on the protesters, many of them students, trying to stifle the biggest display of anti-American anger since the ouster of the ruling Taliban militia 3 1/2 years ago. There were no reports of American casualties, but the violence left four dead and 71 injured in Jalalabad, a city 80 miles east of the capital, Kabul.

Mobs smashed car and shop windows and attacked government offices, the Pakistani consulate and the offices of two U.N. agencies in Jalalabad. Smoke billowed from the consulate and a U.N. building. More than 50 foreign aid workers were reportedly evacuated.

The protests may expand into neighboring Pakistan, where a coalition of hard-line Islamic parties said it would hold nationwide demonstrations Friday over the alleged desecration of the Quran.

The wingnut bluster--all the tough talk (albeit with little action on the part of true nuts--they don't actually JOIN the military) didn't account for such things as extended occupations, "collateral damage," etc. Nor did the wingnut bluster ever reflect upon the absolute insanity of lumping all residents of either Iraq or Afghanistan into the category of "enemy." As a result, we really DO have an extensive number of people in both countries, as well as the rest of the region, who hate us...since 9/11, we've killed at least seven times as many Iraqi civilians and who knows how many Afghans. But, of course, the United States "doesn't do body counts."

I wonder if we're going to do any postwar analysis now that we've lost.