Mark Phillips: The American Question
3/24/03: Women with guns.
The Iraqi people are armed, like the citizen militia envisioned by Thomas Jefferson.
Women with guns.
Iraqi mass resistance has temporarily stopped the U.S. invasion.
"Mass resistance" must be taken literally. Iraq, as we're all learning,
is a nation of armed citizens. Their determination to fight has brought the world's
most powerful military to a full stop.
Today's
Washington Post
reports:
But pilots said they were forced to abandon most of their targets because of a curtain
of fire that rose from streets, roofs and backyards, hitting nearly all their aircraft. U.S.
defense officials in Washington said the mission involved between 30 and 40 Apaches.
"It was coming from all directions, I got shot front, back, left and right," said pilot
Bob Duffney, 41, a chief warrant officer 4 from Springfield, Mass., who flew combat helicopters
in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "In Desert Storm, we didn't have a firefight like this," he said.
Who did the shooting? Hundreds of Iraqi "irregulars", that is, the people. It's ironic
that the imperial army has been halted by an armed citizenry who embody the ideals of America's
Founding Fathers.
Like the Pentagon's planners, I
predicted
this all wrong.
I believed the Iraqi people would bow to the inevitable, rise against the Ba'ath Party,
and cynically greet our troops as liberators. Instead they've fought with ferocity and
at times great cunning.
I did get one thing right, though, and that's the key thing. The outcome of the U.S.
invasion will depend on the choices made by the Iraqi people. These are exactly the
people who Pentagon planners forgot.
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