WTF Is It Now?!?

Experts Question Depth of Victory
"'Mission accomplished'?? WTF was he taking, anyway??"

"I thought we were holding our own until this week, and now I'm not sure," - retired Air Force Col. Richard M. Atchison, a former intelligence officer for the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East. "If we don't get this operation moving soon, the opposition will continue to grow, and we will have a much larger problem."

From the Washingtoon comPost: The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.

Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.

Retired Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford was even gloomier, predicting "a long, tough haul in Iraq."

"The longer this goes on, the more violent these events will become," said Fulford, a former deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe. "We learned this in Lebanon and Somalia -- and Iraq is much more challenging than either of these."


The US death toll in Iraq has passed 200.