Iraq: Anatomy of An Abduction and A Search
The setting of the biggest drama in Iraq at the moment — the search for three American soldiers abducted in the Sunni Triangle by Al Qaeda insurgents — is a strange one for people accustomed to seeing TV news footage of downtown Baghdad and vast stretches of desert.
The intense dragnet being led by 4,000 troops about 15 miles southwest of Baghdad is in the fertile farming region of Yusifiyah and Mahmudiyah, which are abutted by the Euphrates River and amidst the cradle of Western civilization. Instead of streets and sands there are grasslands, irrigated farm fields and date palm groves reminiscent of parts of Vietnam scoured and scorched by U.S. troops four decades ago.
Andrew Cockburn writes that:
The capture of Americans — like the hostages in Lebanon in the Eighties or in the Tehran embassy in 1979 — has traditionally had a greater impact on the U.S. public than the death of soldiers. It is the nightmare of American commanders, going all the way to the Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, for U.S. servicemen to be in enemy hands. The loss of these three prisoners could prove to be even more significant this time, as the public is already firmly against the war. A drawn-out hostage crisis, that ends in tragedy, could be the final blow to President’s Bush’s faltering support amongst Republicans.
Maybe so or maybe not so. The public is indeed already firmly against the war, but the incident is getting little coverage in the mainstream media and the focus of most Americans is, as usual, elsewhere. Another week of bad news — even a hostage taking that could quite conceivably end tragically — just isn’t going to trip too many people’s triggers, let alone represent a final blow to an isolated president who long ago squandered his credibility and is now being abandoned by many Republican congressfolk.
From the reports that we are getting, notably the detailed and nuanced accounts provided by Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail, the search is going well enough that there is confidence the insurgents have been trapped in a box near the ambush site and have been unable to move the abducted GIs out of the region had that been their intention. That would be a hugely positive development given the past history of such snatches.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.
Map courtesy of The Fourth Rail
2 Responses to “Iraq: Anatomy of An Abduction and A Search”
Shaun,
Roggio’s site is the “Fourth” Rail, not the Third, but the fact that you read him is both comforting and disconcerting to me at the same time.
What Roggio posts up daily invariably covers a lot more ground than say, the UK Guardian.
Why then would what some London editors have to say exude more credibility to you than someone who is down and dirty……and following in YOUR footsteps.
casualobserver:
I have been covering this war sh*t for going on four decades. It has always been difficult to find reporters and commentators who fly beneath the mainstream media radar.
Cockburn and Roggio are two of those people.
I don’t give a rat’s ass if Cockburn (who happens to be in the Sunni Triangle right now) works for the Telegraph or Mad magazine. There is a political bent to his writing, but his reportage is sterling and this goes all the way back to Henry Kissinger’s illegal war in Cambodia, which Cockburn blew the lid right off of.
Roggio is somewhat a different kettle of fish. Although we often don’t agree about the progress of the war (and in fact had a spat the other day over what I viewed as his overly rosy assessments of efforts to neuter Al Qaeda in Anbar), Bill like Cockburn is fearless when he does his frequent embeds.
As a matter of fact, Bill and I had a spirited private exchange this morning and he kindly made one significant correction to the original version of my post. He noted that there have been relatively few incidents in which patrols were where they shouldn’t have been such as this one and got ambushed. This was counter to my initial claim that there had been many such incident. I didn’t know my stuff; Bill did.
Finally, you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
As a troll and snark, you view everything through a political and or ideological context, so it confuses you that I can use the work of a leftie like Cockburn and a moderate like Roggio in the same post.
As a blogger, I cherrypick the best stuff available, filter for political content and, yes, sometimes add my own. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.