The Most Important Thing…
…going on right now is not the fate of Mark Foley or Dennis Hastert, and it’s certainly not which party comes out on top in a month. It’s the fact that we have tens of thousands of troops off fighting a tough war, and I hate the fact that all of this useless tabloid noise is overshadowing truly important things like this:
The Iraq war could be heading to its decisive moment: a battle for the capital of Baghdad that already has turned dramatically bloodier for American soldiers and carries enormous stakes for the country’s future.
At least 13 American soldiers have been killed around Baghdad since Monday — the highest four-day U.S. toll in the capital since the 2003 invasion.
That count is likely to rise higher as the U.S.-led forces step up their campaign to root out the extremist militias, death squads and terrorist cells that have turned the city into a collection of armed, ethnically divided camps.
No longer a limited security problem while the main war was being fought out west in Anbar province, the battle of Baghdad is turning out to be “a critical point in the Iraq war,” says former Pentagon analyst Anthony Cordesman.
“Securing Baghdad … won’t win. But losing Baghdad will lose,” Cordesman says. “If they lose, Iraq is likely to slip into a major civil war.”
Much of Baghdad is yet to be targeted in the joint U.S.-Iraqi pacification operation. Top commanders — signaling the toughest fight is yet to come — say they need six more Iraqi battalions, or 3,000 soldiers, to join the 30,000 Iraqi security forces and 15,000 Americans already in the city.
U.S. commanders have defined victory as reducing violence in the capital to the point where Iraqi civilian police could handle security. With order restored in the capital, the Iraqi government then could focus on providing security and basic services to the rest of the country — thus creating conditions for U.S. troops to leave.
Baghdad is “the center of gravity for the country. Everybody knows that,” Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “The bad guys know it, we know it, the Iraqis know it. So we have to help the Iraqis secure their capital if they’re going to go forward.”
The Battle For Baghdad is raging, and it barely lands on our radar screen – that is a fact that reflects poorly on us all.
I wonder how it makes our fine men and women fighting and dying over there feel to know that they’re less newsworthy than a disgraced congressman with a thing for young boys. The only saving grace is that they’re no doubt too busy working their tails off to know…
Mine is not in Iraq, but Afghanistan, and I know he and his boys don’t care what the MSM think of them. They are doing their job. Their family and God love them – that’s all that counts in the end.
Well, good point – I should say we are fighting two difficult wars…
[...] Last night, I lamented the fact that the really important things like events in Baghdad have been swallowed up by the Mark Foley story (though I feel vindicated in saying that the story had peaked – I think that’s proven to be the case). Daniel Henninger is of a like mind: It’s hard to believe that the Foley/instant message/congressional-page/GOP meltdown story has run for a week. Other than the slaughter in Amish country, is anyone aware of anything else of note in the world that happened the past seven days? Dive deep enough beneath the Foley flotsam and you discover reports that North Korea may be preparing to conduct an underground nuclear test. China and South Korea are at this hour trying to forestall the Hermit Kingdom’s nuke test and no doubt could use an expression of support and outrage from the American political establishment. Sorry, they’re busy reading Congressman Foley’s 1995 email traffic. [...]