April 12, 2003

A Separate Peace?

...this city has stopped dead. Electric power is out. Telephones do not work. Much of the city is without running water. Hospitals have been looted of the few medical supplies they had on hand.

What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into unlighted darkness had been completely ransacked.

At the Yarmuk Hospital, the largest medical center on the western side of Baghdad, they took not just all the beds, medicines and operating room equipment, but also the CAT, MRI and ultrasound scanners.

Taking over a country and toppling its civil organization with technology and smaller numbers of ground forces appears to have aided this anarchy. I feel sorry for those untrained marines and soldiers trying to cope with this. I wonder if that vase that Rumsfeld was bitching about during yesterday's news conference was an 8,000-year-old amphora? Seeing the wreckage of the National Museum reminded me of a movie; was it Logan's Run that had a fight scene in the chambers of a crumbling US Capitol Building, many years in the future?

Military police by the thousands are needed, obviously. I wonder how many reservists are MPs, and I wonder how many of those are civilian cops who can't easily be called up without further decimating police forces all around this country. What a mess. Brilliant war plan; non-existent peace plan.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 12, 2003 11:08 PM
Comments

Yep, this is a mess.
I would have thought that someone would have known that this would happen and make provisions for it.
BTW, What the hell is someone going to do with a stolen CAT scan machine anyway??

Posted by: toxiclabrat at April 13, 2003 03:56 AM

Or the incubator for premature babies? Yeah, that's going to help you out, bub.

Something tells me we planned on doing this.

Posted by: Scott at April 13, 2003 05:16 AM

But why would we have planned on doing this? Or was it wide-eyed optimism that Iraq would fall easily, strew flowers in our path, and everything would be easy? General Shinseki has repeatedly warned that stabilizing Iraq after war would require *way* more troops than have been committed. This looks like the result of bad planning and an unwillingness on Rumsfeld's part to concede that Shinseki might know more than he does.

Posted by: Raye at April 13, 2003 12:21 PM

"the result of bad planning"

I suspect nobody expected the entire Iraqi army to quit and walk away, but one could have expected some form of anarchy and planned for that. It doesn't look to me like anyone did.

Posted by: Linkmeister at April 13, 2003 12:54 PM

Damn! Maybe Bush planned on liberating the Iraqi people of their means to recover and survive?! Disgusting.

Posted by: ali at April 13, 2003 08:37 PM

It's a result of American arrogance. They fully expected this all to be clean and easy - that this would make us "look good," and then all nations would bow to our feet, because "we showed them!" HAH. - Showed them is right. :o(

Posted by: JeanNINE at April 14, 2003 09:57 AM