Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
Unscrew the cork
Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University and a local restaurateur. He can be reached at via e-mail.
The smoke was still rising from our Chinook helicopter when Saadoun Jaralla, an Iraqi wheat farmer, spoke those words, standing not far from the crash site, not far from where American troops were scouring through the smoldering wreckage for 16 dead American soldiers and 20 wounded.
Saadoun Jaralla wasn't alone. Channelnewsasia.com reported that villagers around the site rejoiced at the news of the crash, the single deadliest blow to American forces since the war began. "It's party time for us," said farmer Ahmad al-Issawi. "If the resistance carries on like this, the Americans will leave Iraq."
On the same day, guerrilla attacks took the lives of three other Americans in Iraq -- a U.S. soldier killed by a bomb attack in Baghdad and two members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers killed by a roadside bomb that hit a convoy of American personnel in civilian vehicles.
TV footage showed a jubilant mob of young Iraqi men dancing around the burning vehicle, shouting anti-American and Islamic slogans, and a joyful youth wearing a U.S. Army helmet. Said Ammar Majid, who works at a local car dealership: "A roadside bomb struck a car and the people inside were burned alive. We were all very happy today."
A day earlier, an upbeat Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, assured the media that his forces remained on the offensive in the face of "what we regard as a strategically and operationally insignificant surge of attacks."
A week prior to the helicopter attack, guerrillas fired a barrage of rockets at the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying, killing one American soldier and wounding 17 other people. The next day, four suicide attacks killed 35 people at the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and three police stations in Baghdad.
Spiral landings
The Chinook transport helicopter was the fourth American chopper brought down in Iraq since President Bush made his "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended" declaration on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1. A fifth crashed Friday.
At Baghdad International, pilots no longer land in a gradual descent; instead, in order to avoid shoulder-fired missiles, they keep their planes at a high altitude until they're right above the airport and then spiral downward and abruptly land. The landings look a lot like how brown pelicans do their fishing, flying straight along up high and then all of a sudden falling straight down in dangerous-looking crash dives to the water, like they've been shot.
And so, we've corkscrewed ourselves into a spot where October was the bloodiest month since the "major combat operations" supposedly ended in May, and November is worse.
On sustainability, a congressional report says we're stretched too thin to keep up current levels of deployment past March. On the borders, we're about as successful at stopping the flow of jihadists from Syria and Iran as we are at stopping the flow of cocaine from Tijuana to San Diego. At the polls, for the first time, a majority of Americans now disapprove of the way the administration is handling "postwar" Iraq.
Solution? Declare victory over Saddam, and tell the Iraqis that it's now their blood, sweat and tears, not ours, that will determine their future.
