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.
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Map courtesy of The Fourth Rail