Sen. John McCain strolled briefly through an open-air market in Baghdad today in an effort to prove that Americans are "not getting the full picture" of what's going on in Iraq.
NBC's Nightly News provided further details about McCain's one-hour guided tour. He was accompanied by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." Still photographs provided by the military to NBC News seemed to show McCain wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit. Watch it:
I'll bet there was another rifle company or two on the perimeter as well.
Strangely reminiscent of a "County Fair" in another troubled land long ago and far away...
County Fair was a combination of military, civic and psychological warfare actions to reestablish the Vietnamese government control over the populace of a given area. It was designed to flush the Viet Cong from the community in which they were a parasite, while at the same time insuring that the populace was not alienated towards the government. Military actions were accompanied by a vigorous civic action program which attempted to convince the population that the government was interested in the welfare of the people and that a governments victory over the Viet Cong was inevitable.
It worked great! In the CAP the Marines stayed, sometimes for many months, recruited locals to fight the VC, got medical care for the locals, etc., etc. Then the Marines left...
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