Thursday, October 20, 2005

Iraq fatigue

We've been reading lately ab0ut "donation fatigue" or "disaster fatigue," resulting in diminished giving by Americans to charities because of the unending series of catastrophes in the last year or so. The result, no doubt, will be that the 60,000 or so (but who's counting?) dead Pakistanis and Indians who are still buried under earthquake rubble will just have to wait until the US and other nations can get it together again to assist. (But with a new hurricane to watch, there may be no further aid forthcoming, and certainly no more news coverage on the television.)

But that's another story. I'm suffering, instead, from Iraq fatigue and I may be one of the last to catch the disorder. I haven't quite quit counting our dead soldiers (1987 as of this morning, five killed yesterday), and I still read the stories on the various websites, but it's hard to maintain the outrage day after day, outrage after outrage. So, when a post appears on this blog dealing with Iraq, I assure you it's been interiorly vetted by me, the least outrageous developments have been filtered out, leaving only the worst--the very worst--developments for reportage here.

Here's today's outrage: Condi Rice's latest concept, "clear, hold and build." Under this scenario, as far as I can tell, our troops will take over an area by force, guard and assist construction people as they rebuild what we've destroyed. If this isn't VietNam all over again, I don't know what is. Remember the phrase "fortified hamlet"?

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