From The New York Times:
NAJAF, Iraq, April 2 — In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today....
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"
Around him, the crowd roared its approval. Yet when the first round of welcomes to American soldiers and journalists were exuberantly, even affectionately completed, the people in the crowd had a more urgent request than liquor. They wanted water.
There has been none in this town for four days. Again and again, people pointed to the sky, tilted their heads back and pointed to their open mouths. A boy, age about 6 or 7, approached an American reporter and said the two words that were uttered over and over: "America. Good." Then he kissed the reporter on the cheek, shook his hand and pointed to the sky, pleading for water.
Remember, kids. War is never justified. Ever. Always it is better to leave people in suffering and oppression for however many years it takes. It would have been better to allow ten more years of Saddam running people through plastic shredders, torturing and killing dissidents, than it would have been to do what we do today.
After all, the "peace" and "anti-war" activists told us so, and they're never wrong.
They certainly never admit to being wrong, anyway.
I first misread that as “one man in a thong”, which is a much different mental image...
On a more serious note: I wonder how much of these images are getting out to the European and (more importantly) Arab press? If all we get are these images, and all they get are the blood and guts images, we are going to have very different views of what happened in this war. Indeed, we will have a much harder time with the next war (say *crosses fingers* Saudi Arabia) if all they see of America’s liberation of Iraq is an unjustified act of aggression leading to many gory deaths...
Well... I'm not sure that this story, in itself, is great evidence. These people apparently had water to drink before the war started, and now they don't. And if somebody doesn't get them some soon, they'll all be dead.
And this story from Umm Qasr, where things are presumably as good as they get in liberated Iraq,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2915091.stm
makes me think that it might be difficult to do so.
If some sort of order isn't restored in the areas under coalition control, very soon, Chomsky is going to have his genocide to crow about.
Hmm... A slightly more optimistic take on the water situation in Umm Qasr:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22197-2003Apr3.html
I've made a private deal with the anti-war types: they don't have to admit to their error, but I get to keep all the democracy, whiskey, and sex.
It's a fair deal.