Though you can never grow “accustomed” to the killings of American troops by improvised bombs planted by roadsides or the wholesale murders of Iraqis by car bombs driven into crowds, at least we had seen the aftermaths of enough of them on the evening news to have achieved a grim kind of numbness in that regard.
But the nation experienced a whole new level of outrage at midweek with the publishing and airing of unspeakable images of a vicious mob killing four American civilian security men, burning them, dragging them through the streets, and hanging their grotesquely charred bodies from a bridge.
All this went on for hours. But the mood in the city of Fallujah was so out-of-control that neither Iraqi police nor U.S. troops dared venture in to try and stop the savagery. Americans everywhere were enraged. But such is the sense of division and frustration in this country that there was little agreement on who to be mad at. The anger flowed into at least three distinct channels.
Some people, in a familiar shoot-the-messenger reaction, blamed the media for showing the pictures. In a letter in today’s issue of The Pilot. Tom Panek of Pinehurst blasted The News & Observer of Raleigh for putting a photo of the strung-up remains on page 8A. (The Charlotte Observer provoked even more of a firestorm by playing a similar image at the top of its front page.)
Still other people blamed the Bush administration for setting loose the wolves of war and anarchy in the first place.
Most people, of course, blamed the perpetrators of these hideous acts themselves. U.S. officials vowed to bring the guilty “ghouls” to justice. The only problem with that, of course, is that there were dozens of them running amok. Rather than a terrorist plot whose leaders could be surgically eliminated, it seemed more a spontaneous outburst of group hatred. Punishing the whole city militarily would hardly improve that mood.
More than one Moore County person was heard to say something like, “We ought to just get out of there and let those people stew in their own juices.” The problem with that, of course, is that we were the ones who set the juices to flowing by removing Saddam Hussein’s’ despicable government, whose terror regime was the only thing holding the country’s seethingly disparate ethnic elements together. Abruptly departing and letting them sink into civil war hardly seems a fair or prudent course.
Now that we’re in, we have to stay the course until the situation can somehow be stabilized. But if anyone still harbored any hopes that the coalition forces could meet their deadline of handing control of the country into peaceful Iraqi hands by this summer’s deadline, those hopes went up in smoke Wednesday in the hellish streets of Fallujah.
Not to mention all those fond prewar expectations of Iraqis rushing out welcome their liberators “with open arms.”
