[mburbank]

When I posted it that's all the story there was. The Marines comments came several hours later, and it's still very confused.

Body counts have gone up and down with the marines saying at one point there were no civillian casualties at all. It will probably take some time before anything resembling a factual accounting comes out.

Here are the points that I think stand right now.

It was not an accident.

The Marines say they were returning fire and at least at this point I think they get the benefit of the doubt.

There is a ridiculous amount of clintonian parsing going on about what the word 'Mosque' constitutes. The Marines say only the central domed building is a Mosque. The Iraqis say the entire area within the walls of the religious compund is the Mosque. The Iraqis also say when the domed building is full, worshippers fill the available spaces in the area of the compound outside the domed building and I think that's certainly true.

Offical comments that since we only blew down the wall from which 'insurgents' were firing we could not have killed any noncombatants is absurd. How could we possibly know?


None of it matters in terms of the point of my post. There is no way to conduct an operation like this that endears you to people. The people who hate you already hate you, and anyone on the fence isn't going to decide to like us when we start blowing down the walls of Mosque related program activity areas. The best we could hope for is that we teach them fear which is pretty much how Sadaam ruled them.

There is no right answer here. There is absolutely nothing the US can do as the occupying power that would both keep our people (and there's) safe and steer them toward an american style democracy.

Plus, the more I read about the 'handover' to Iraqi sovreighnity the more queasy I feel. We will retain control of their army, we will have 14 semi-permanent bases of our own, their constitution will have to be approved by us...

Now wonder we're firm on the date. We aren't actually giving them control of anything.