Is it really a victory over the US or just one of the only intelligent things that the US has done. Don't ask me what the others are. I can't think of any.
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It is a victory. A rather significant one.
But there's no need to read my amateur's interpretation of events. Here's what Patrick Cockburn has written:
<snip>
The extraordinary political weakness of the US in Iraq became evident as never before last week. Despite having an overwhelming military force available to take Fallujah and Najaf, the US did not dare do so. It had become evident even in Washington that to crush the resistance in either city - not a difficult task against a few thousand lightly armed gunmen - would spread rather than end the rebellion.
Even so, it was extraordinary to see Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a general in Saddam's Republican Guard - disbanded like so much else in Iraq last May - being driven into Fallujah on Friday in full uniform past cheering crowds. The old Iraqi flag, now dropped by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, was being waved from his car window.
It is a measure of how far the Governing Council is out of touch with ordinary Iraqi opinion that they should have voted to change the flag in the first place. Mohammed, an engineer trying to patch up a broken sewage pipe in Baghdad, still had time to express his fury at the change. "Of course the occupation is a disaster," he said. "We understand the Governing Council are American agents. But a man has to be the worst of collaborators to change his country's flag."
On 30 June the US will be handing over very little to Iraqis. Security remains firmly in US hands; so does control of money. One of the biggest US mistakes was not to hold elections earlier, something British and US officials admit in private could have been done. This would have produced a legitimate Iraqi authority to which Iraqi security forces could have given real loyalty. Dr Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council, says: "Iraqis are never going to fight other Iraqis under the orders of an American." This was amply borne out when half of the US-trained security forces deserted or mutinied in early April.
The tide is going out for the US in Iraq. They were not able to use their military strength against Fallujah and Najaf. They have very little political support outside Kurdistan. They can no longer win. It may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in history.
[...]
full at --
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=517306
>
Of the two most well known Brits reporting from the field -- the other being, of course, Fisk -- Cockburn is considered to be the more measured in tone, the less likely to indulge in alarmism, moralizing or "heavy breathing".
So, it's a bit extraordinary for him to say, without any detectable hesistation, that the US has been defeated.
.d.