Iraq War: Short term and long term

Tom Engelhardt makes an important point, one that the reader might not expect from the title of his piece: George's Inferno: And Other Images from a No-Name War TomDispatch.com 03/02/06. He goes through a careful discussion of the names and images the administration and the mainstream media have used to describe the Iraq War. since the bombing of the Golden Mosque last week, administration officials have been talking about being on the pricipice, and looking into the abyss, and so forth.

But he reminds us not to get too fixated on short-term events. Because:

On the other hand, when you consider our invasion and occupation in, say, six-month intervals, few cliffs or precipices actually appear. Instead, there is a relatively slow, steady devolution. Insurgent attacks rise relatively steadily; services to Iraqis fall relatively steadily; oil production declines over time to its present abysmal level of less than 1 million barrels a day, again rather steadily under the pressure of a botched reconstruction effort and persistent insurgent sabotage; Iraqi casualties increase; the seeds of a possible civil war are planted; bodies, cuffed and shot in the head, begin to appear more frequently in ditches or fields; families flee mixed neighborhoods more regularly. In the meantime, outside Iraq, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia (where recently there was the first failed terrorist attack on an actual oil facility), things also seem to be devolving, even if more slowly yet. In short, while no cliff appears, and there is no particular turning or tipping point; things just get worse. Pick your image for that.

If you think of matters in this fashion, rather than in cliff-hanging terms, then you are driven to another conclusion. As long as the basic components of the situation remain more or less the same, six months from now the situation will be worse. Six months from then, worse yet.

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