Full metal straitjacket

The Bush movie version of the Iraq war is fatally flawed. The administration ran the credits in the middle of the film. Before the story was half over, before all the soldiers and civilians died and before the cavalry had come to the rescue, the hero claimed victory on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

So, now a new scenario has emerged: The unilateral country, determined to wipe out terrorism and perceived weapons of mass destruction, in a go-it-alone Rocky-like fashion, is now pleading for help after intermission.

There’s nothing like continuous scenes of body bags to drag down the audience.

The 130,000 American troops are clearly in jeopardy, but the White House wants no comparison to Lyndon Johnson’s plea for continual escalation. It’s too Apocalypse Now-ish. The budget has ballooned, and $87 billion more was called for by the director last week. What are you going to do, pull the plug midway into shooting?

But ironically, the Nightmare on Baghdad Street is becoming a reality. Remember when Bush warned us about all the terrorists in Iraq, that they were the sponsors of terrorism worldwide? Well, that was just another falsehood to lead us into war. Now, however, the jihad has come alive, and radical Muslims are streaming into Iraq to pick off our troops on a daily basis and terrorize the country with car bombs. Bush has created the terror killing ground he warned us about.

The Pentagon’s plan for a quick strike was so quick it left out the plans for rebuilding the country. And now our troops are left to play cops (see “From the front lines, with love”), and there is no expectation that the climax is coming any time soon. If you want to know what it is really like on a daily basis, read the letters from a soldier who sees reality, not the film version, on a daily basis.