Newspaper Article

More calm, less chaos? More troops

Bookman, Jay

2004

Overview

Tikrit is the hometown of Saddam Hussein, and early in our occupation it was a feared town of hard cases and Baathist loyalists, of men who shared Saddam's tribe, wealth and cruelty. But while much of Iraq has erupted in violence in recent months, Tikrit has been largely silent, tranquil in the calm of the pacified. Fearsome Tikrit generates no headlines and few bodies. Tikrit, by its silence, condemns those men for their arrogance. Here, at the very core of Saddam's strength, the difficult has been achieved. The calm may be a sullen calm, an enforced calm, but it is a calm nonetheless. This is what might have been elsewhere in Iraq if competence had been valued over blind allegiance, if we had been led into this war by serious people who understood that when you bet high stakes, you play to win and you assume nothing. There, no American dares to set foot in the city. A place that we once controlled has slipped from our grasp because we lack the manpower to hold it, and in our absence the city has become a cancer spreading death throughout Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who beheads innocent civilians on videotape, is believed to operate from a safe haven in Fallujah. Many of the car bombs that wreak havoc in Baghdad on an almost daily basis are assembled in Fallujah and then driven out of the city unhindered.

• Publisher: Atlanta Journal Constitution, LLC
• Subject: Hussein, Saddam / Iraq War-2003 / Social conditions & trends / Tikrit Iraq