Shock & Awe One Year Later: The Awful Shock of Reality  Where
have all the flowers gone? What has become of all the heady
predictions of garland-strewn, victory parades in downtown
Baghdad one year after the war began? The toppled bronze statue,
a media event staged to celebrate the toppling of Saddam
Hussein, signaled an end to one phase of the war'The Shock and
Awe quick strike phase'and the beginning of the long, hard slog
of military occupation. To say we were right a year later'those
outspoken critics of the patriotic Old Right, journalists like
Justin Raimondo and Eric Margolis, or those of the Activist
Left'is beside the point. I admit a flawed logic in my own
column at that time--Shock and Awe Followed by Block to Block?--
but the "block to block" of attrition was sadly foreseeable. One
only needed to glance at Gaza or the West Bank and add a
thousand times more guns. Few predicted however, and who could
have besides perhaps Robert Fisk, the cruel reality of day-to-
day human casualties in Iraq after th