"We got him."
Dec. 14th, 2003 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoSome impressions.
* Bush appears to have alluded to this, but he almost certainly doesn't mean it, given the Official Position: We're about to find out just how much of the Iraqi insurgency is due to "Saddam Loyalists". My own feeling is that the number of Saddam Loyalists in the country was about a dozen, and Saddam's own meek response to his capture only reinforces that. It's pretty tough to believe Saddam himself was providing much direction from a 2 meter hole in the ground. Which means the insurgency is mostly Iraqis who are nationalists and/or Islamists, who just want the Coalition the hell out. Capturing Saddam does nothing to change thatand the floggings will continue until morale improves so the campaign against Coalition forces will change by not one iota.
* We also got a large hint about why Saddam was so tough to capture. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, in the very first briefing from Baghdad (which I saw live last night over the web, at 0405 PST or so -- bad Hal!) said they first received intel on Saddam's whereabouts at 1050 local on Saturday. Saddam wasn't actually captured until 2000-2015 or so. Taking 9 hours to spin up the troops is pretty sad, even if they had to get 600 troops together, as has been reported. If previous attempts to capture Saddam took about as long to execute, that would go a long way to explaining his ability to elude us. (This, of course, takes the optimistic view we wanted to catch him. I suspect Saddam was more useful to us as a bogeyman on whom all sorts of things could be blamed without fear of contradiction. Now we can't pin things on him anymore, on a day-to-day basis.)
* Separated at birth: Saddam Hussein and Karl Marx?
(Thanks to Jon Snow of UK Channel 4 news and his e-mail newsletter for the similarity... Saddam mit giant beard kept reminding me of someone, and I couldn't place it.)
* Bush appears to have alluded to this, but he almost certainly doesn't mean it, given the Official Position: We're about to find out just how much of the Iraqi insurgency is due to "Saddam Loyalists". My own feeling is that the number of Saddam Loyalists in the country was about a dozen, and Saddam's own meek response to his capture only reinforces that. It's pretty tough to believe Saddam himself was providing much direction from a 2 meter hole in the ground. Which means the insurgency is mostly Iraqis who are nationalists and/or Islamists, who just want the Coalition the hell out. Capturing Saddam does nothing to change that
* We also got a large hint about why Saddam was so tough to capture. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, in the very first briefing from Baghdad (which I saw live last night over the web, at 0405 PST or so -- bad Hal!) said they first received intel on Saddam's whereabouts at 1050 local on Saturday. Saddam wasn't actually captured until 2000-2015 or so. Taking 9 hours to spin up the troops is pretty sad, even if they had to get 600 troops together, as has been reported. If previous attempts to capture Saddam took about as long to execute, that would go a long way to explaining his ability to elude us. (This, of course, takes the optimistic view we wanted to catch him. I suspect Saddam was more useful to us as a bogeyman on whom all sorts of things could be blamed without fear of contradiction. Now we can't pin things on him anymore, on a day-to-day basis.)
* Separated at birth: Saddam Hussein and Karl Marx?
(Thanks to Jon Snow of UK Channel 4 news and his e-mail newsletter for the similarity... Saddam mit giant beard kept reminding me of someone, and I couldn't place it.)
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-14 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-14 04:35 pm (UTC)Doesn't sound like those folks are going to be discouraged by Saddam's capture. They even may be thinking that the US has less of a reason to stay now.