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Thursday, April 03, 2003
Editorial: Messing things up
Run an experiment like opening Colon St. in Cebu City to two-way traffic without getting itself and the public ready for the results.
That’s what the city’s traffic agency Citom did the other day.
What happened on the first day of a 30-day traffic test on Cebu’s busiest street downtown should be sobering enough to planners and implementors. A monstrous traffic jam that spilled over to other streets related to Colon produced curses from commuters and drivers who thought they had already seen the worst.
This is not to pass judgment on the merit of the traffic idea, but only to point out that the first-day confusion could have been reduced if not avoided.
Not seeing to it that the traffic enforcers came promptly on the crucial day was bad enough. Forgetting to turn on the traffic lights sensors for the route change was almost criminal.
Images of the war
Opposers of the war—from peace advocates on the streets to Arabs who sympathize with the Iraqis to world leaders from France, Russia and China—want the war to end. Even those cheering for President Bush and his war hawks wish the war were quicker for the invading allies.
But the war cannot end so easily.
China wants the US and British forces to pull out from Iraq immediately. That would be severe loss of face for the coalition. President Bush has promised his country and the rest of the world no less than total victory.
Already, Washington military experts are divided on the strategy they are employing in the war. They expected the bombs to demoralize the Iraqis and come out in droves to surrender. That is not working. The allies are calling for more reinforcements, adopting a new tack, the use of overwhelming force to battle the enemy on the ground.
The coalition forces can get locked in a bruising and costly battle on the streets of Baghdad whose traps and other perils they still have to know.
Could the Battle of Baghdad provide the number of casualties that the war in Iraq has so far failed to produce?
Morbid as it is, some say it would take thousands of body bags shipped home before American leaders start thinking about dropping the idea of converting Iraq into a democracy.
During the American civil war (1861-65), the Confederate Army lost 25,000 men at the Battle of Gettysburg alone. The Union sent division after division to assault a ridge called Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg only to be cut down by Confederate fire: 12,000 men were killed in that battle.
Casualties that high could send the American nation reeling. But apparently not the figures coming from the Iraqi war. After 12 days of bombing, shelling and shooting, less than a few hundred soldiers were reported killed from both sides.
Besides, the images of war brought home on color tv show the weapons and the bombs, not the carnage. Despite the new technology of reporting, the reportage doesn’t show an ugly war, not the way the pictures from Vietnam did.
The war has to be terrible for people not to grow too fond of it, to paraphrase US Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
But must war look really ugly for people to reject it?
(April 3, 2003 issue)
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