{"id":2374,"date":"2004-10-29T10:45:35","date_gmt":"2004-10-29T14:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/10\/29\/2374.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:46","slug":"news-from-the-front","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/10\/29\/news-from-the-front\/","title":{"rendered":"news from the front"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Articles such as this one<\/a> in the Times remind me that there were an awful lot of people who warned, before the invasion, that this could well degenerate into a house-to-house shooting war. As it happens, I am not one of them; I can’t say that I ever came to a decision about whether it was really likely or not. On the one hand, it never occurred to me that our military would be ill-trained and ill-equipped (in large measure, though not altogether). On the other hand, I did not particularly expect our troops to be greeted with flowers, New English bibles and voter registration cards. Anyway, the crows and Cassandras were right, as they often are, and will undoubtedly get their usual reward for it.\n

And as long as I’m on about it, in April of 2003, I mentioned that I was relieved that the Butcher’s Bill for this little adventure in democracy, non-proliferation and international harmony was so low. Hahahahaha. I was so funny, and I didn’t even know. I can’t say that I find <\/a> this survey<\/a> (or, for those who wish to register for the Lancet, this full report<\/a>) altogether convincing, but I think we can safely say that the Butcher’s Bill is pretty damn’ high, and it’s going to get higher. Sure, it’s being paid by Iraqis, for the most part. Oh, and remember how sweet it was when Dick Cheney paid tribute to the Iraqi spirit by using their dead to make it appear that the US wasn’t becoming a pariah state? Now there are more numbers? See? The US can’t be considered a rogue state when Iraqis have been joining us in graves a thousand for one! Now that’s<\/I> freedom on the march.\n

Sorry, I got carried away there. Let the bitterness go, just feed it to the ducks. Hope is on the way, or help or something. I’ll go have a lie-down.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Articles such as this one in the Times remind me that there were an awful lot of people who warned, before the invasion, that this could well degenerate into a house-to-house shooting war. As it happens, I am not one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17171,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions\/17171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}