How Low Can They Go?

A top Army general said yesterday that the Iraqi insurgency was being run in part by former senior Iraqi Baath Party officials operating in Syria who call themselves the "New Regional Command".

These men, from the former governing party of deposed president Saddam Hussein, are "operating out of Syria with impunity and providing direction and financing for the insurgency," said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq. "That needs to stop," Casey said at a Pentagon briefing.

Right. So, the Resistance is comprised "former Baath officials" "directing" and funding "foreign terrorists" in Iraq. Who's missing in this equation? Uh, oh yeah: Iraqis themselves.

Is there some reason to think that neither the 200,000 refugees from Fallujah that are starving and freezing in makeshift camps outside their city, nor any of the other of the millions of beleaguered and battered Iraqis, could be "directing" themselves to blow the Americans' asses off? Well, sure there is: because we liberated them. Q.E.D..

Never mind that less than 5% of Iraqis have any trust in the Americans, or that the Shiites are emphatically selling the forthcoming election as the categorical end-date of the occupation. It's the "former regime elements" and the bin Ladenites that are running the show. (If we are to believe this, by the way, it's yet another striking Bush Administration admission that Saddam and Osama are still kicking our ass all up and down the sidewalk. And that if the Baathists are able to "direct" the resistance from Syria, that they must have infiltrated the Green Zone to a much greater degree that is currently presumed to be the case.)

But anyway, this scenario sounds somewhat familiar, doesn't it? A rebel army funded and "directed" from abroad -- where have we heard this before? Uh, oh yeah: the Reagan Administration's war on Nicaragua. (Not quite the same: at least the Nicaraguan government was democratically elected, and at least the Contras themselves were Nicaraguans, and at least the presumed Baathists are Iraqis. But these are minor details, yes yes.) The World Court ruled that that war "needed to stop" as well. But we kinda sorta ignored that ruling.

Give Casey props for the name, anyway: "New Regional Command". If it's a sign of more poetic lying to come, that'll at least be better than Rumsfeld's semi-literate spew.

Posted by Eddie Tews at December 16, 2004 11:33 PM