Link: A pair of Rip Van Winkles in Baghdad | Needlenose.
Boy, it sure does help to have the journalistic big guns traveling to Iraq in advance of this weekend's elections. Erstwhile Baghdad bureau chief John Burns makes a discovery in the New York Times, discussing the threat of car bombings on the road to the capital's airport:
American commanders, acknowledging they have little chance of stopping the suicide bombers once the bomb-laden vehicles set out, have authorized the machine-gunners in the last vehicle of each convoy to open fire on any driver who ignores hand signals and warning shots to back off as he approaches a convoy from the rear.
This tactic has led to a growing number of incidents in which American gunners, in Humvees traveling at 50 miles an hour or less, have fired at suspected car bombers, only to discover afterward that the drivers who died were innocent civilians who had missed the warning signals, or perhaps never knew that overtaking American convoys was likely to be fatal.These incidents have compounded a widespread impression among the people of Baghdad that the Americans are careless of Iraqi lives. Dr. Naqib, the dentist, fearful as he is of insurgent attacks, said he feared the Americans more. "The Americans, they are part of the terrorism," he said.
"They're so frightened, anything that happens to them, they start shooting right away."
In the New Republic, war-boosting columnist Lawrence Kaplan comes to a similar realization:
. . . for less privileged Iraqis, it has become a truism of everyday life in Baghdad that they stand a greater chance of being gunned down by nervous U.S. troops, reeling from an ambush or an improvised explosive device, than of being blown up by a suicide bomber. My Iraqi driver, for one, has no problem idling in bumper-to-bumper traffic (though I do). But, when an American patrol speeds by, he nearly swerves off the road.
Uh, hello -- this is news to you guys?!? It's such an obvious and counterproductive situation that the guerrillas have been consciously using it against us since the beginning of the resistance.
If it takes more than a year and a half just for the journalists to pick up on this, I wonder how long it will take the military to get a clue about it.
