October 20, 2002
Sniper as Reality Check
Martin Kettle writing in The Guardian points out that the inability of law enforcement to catch up to the sniper who is killing people one by one in the DC area should give pause to those who believe in the ideal scenarios being hyped by the war advocates."Few people in the United States seem to ask themselves whether there are wider lessons for American strategy to be learned from the continuing failure to catch the sniper operating almost on the White House's doorstep," says Kettle. "Working with the most sophisticated equipment, with no resource constraints of any kind, and with 100% support and cooperation from the local population - in other words, in the optimum imaginable conditions - the police have neither caught their man nor been able to prevent him from striking again."
Even using their imaginary "smart-technology" war scenarios, the hawks haven't been able to make a war on Iraq and its aftermath sound in the least bit easy, if even manageable. But this sniper incident should give pause to even those who believe such fairy tales about the Bush administration's multi-war agenda.
-- By David Cogswell