Scenario for disaster I hope

Scenario for disaster

I hope Dom is wrong and I hope the general quoted in the Washington Post are wrong, but I think there is a distinct possibility both are right.

Dom, from his vantage point in Australia, writes:

As I feared, Arab media are using the human face of war to great advantage. The Moslem world is being whipped into a frenzy with pictures of blasted bodies, wide eyed children in bloody bandages, heart-broken women weeping. It will not surprise me if Moslem volunteers from far off Indonesia and Bangladesh arrive in Iraq.

That scenario, of course, takes time to evolve. But put it together with this story leading today's Washington Post and you have a disaster brewing. The story begins:

Despite the rapid advance of Army and Marine forces across Iraq over the past week, some senior U.S. military officers are now convinced that the war is likely to last months and will require considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait, senior defense officials said today.

The combination of wretched weather, long and insecure supply lines, and an enemy that has refused to be supine in the face of American combat power has led to a broad reassessment by some top generals of U.S. military expectations and timelines. Some of them see even the potential threat of a drawn-out fight that sucks in more and more U.S. forces. Both on the battlefield in Iraq and in Pentagon conference rooms, military commanders were talking today about a longer, harder war than had been expected just a week ago, the officials said.

My fear - and I suspect Dom's - is not based on winners and losers - we all lose in war. It's simply watching the inevitable cycle of violence grow like the cancer it is, feeding on itself to expand itself. the way out seems to be a quick and violent US victory. But then you come back to Gandhi's warning - the good created by violence is short lived, the evil permanent.

I get this vision of pouring negative energy into something to destroy it. The energy destroys the evil thing - absolutely squashes it - then fans out lighting a thousand brush fires which, in an image Dom used earlier, converge into one huge conflagration. Not a very uplifting thought, but there is nothing uplifting about this situation. Posted by Greg Stone at March 27, 2003 07:45 AM