Blogtrek

Yet another dead-for-a-ducat strike

Over the weekend the US again tried to take out the deposed Iraqi leadership, including perhaps Saddam himself, with a strike near the Syrian border. That makes three dead-for-a-ducat strikes that the US has made on Iraqi leadership. I get the name for this type of action from Shakespeare's Hamlet, in the scene where Hamlet is griping to the Queen and others about conditions in Denmark and then he hears a scream behind a curtain. Thinking it is the King who killed his father, the rightful King, he takes a swing with his dagger at the curtain and kills not the King, but Polonius, while saying "How now a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!" Hamlet's strike did not turn out well. He did not take out the King, and he killed innocent people in the process.

Is that what's happened to the three dead-for-a-ducat strikes in Persian Gulf War II? One thing's for sure. At least two of these strikes were failures (with respect to an individual, say Saddam). This is because you can kill a person only once. If the first dead-for-a-ducat strike succeeded, then the second two were certain failures. Of course, each of these strikes could have taken one element out from the set {Saddam, Qusai, Udai}. But it isn't likely.

The thing that's for sure now is that the US campaign in Iraq is not going well. The oil has yet to flow and the drilling equipment is in bad shape, American soldiers are being killed almost every day, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and the new prosperous democratic Iraq is taking shape very slowly.