Category: Internet

MSNBC reports things are going well in Basra:

April 5 — U.S. officials told NBC News on Saturday that they believed an overnight airstrike killed the man known as “Chemical Ali,” a cousin of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and commander of Iraq’s southern front. Meanwhile, leaders of the ruling Baath Party in Iraq’s second city Basra reportedly fear public reprisals and were seeking to negotiate a surrender to British military forces besieging the city.

The people are helping coalition forces root out the Baathists now, so they’re toast. So much for “fierce resistance against foreign invaders.”

The Telegraph reports that toxics have been dumped into the Euphrates:

Mustard gas and cyanide have been found in river water in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, coalition forces said yesterday.

The poisonous substances are believed to have been dumped in the Euphrates either by Iraqi soldiers fleeing from American troops or local factories that produced weapons of mass destruction.

…further proof that peacenik Dennis Kucinich had his head in a dark place when he declared on the House floor that Saddam didn’t have WMDs.

Link via Jarvis warblog.

Remember how we’ve been told by the peaceniks that Iraq doesn’t have any banned WMDs? Oops:

Fayetteville Online
U.S. troops find chemicals
By Kevin Maurer
Staff writer

SOUTH CENTRAL IRAQ – U.S. forces uncovered a huge weapons cache Thursday on the outskirts of Samawah.

An 82nd Airborne Division chemical officer said missiles and chemical agents that could be used as weapons were found nearby.

The find came as Fort Bragg troops, working with other units, continue to guard supply lines for the soldiers and Marines pushing their way into Baghdad. The 82nd is operating around Samawah, a city of 180,000 people in south central Iraq.

Soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 41st Infantry Regiment were setting up a traffic checkpoint in the southwestern part of the city when they discovered the weapons.

“I walked up on it,” said Pfc. Eric Colvin. He was searching buildings in an industrial park on the side of the road. The 41st Infantry called in soldiers from the 82nd’s 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment to destroy the cache.

Soldiers said it contained about 1,300 mortar rounds, 450 rocket-propelled grenades and two RPG launchers. About 1,000 rounds of small arms ammunition and 700 grenades were also discovered.

Via Command Post.

Blogger John J. Reilly explains the flaw in Saddam’s war plan:

Back in the early 1980s, Americans who worked in the Japanese financial services industry often went through three stages in their assessment of it. When they arrived, they looked at those corporate balance-sheets that consisted mostly of debt and at the rigged securities markets. Their first impression was that the whole thing was lunacy. Then, after they had been in Japan for a while, they began to understand the Japanese way of doing things. They would decide that no, the financial system was not lunacy; it was just different. After they had been there long enough, however, they would finally conclude that, yes, the system was different, but it was still crazy.

I suspect that is going to be the sequence in which we will understand the Iraqi strategy as it has developed by the second week of the war

.

He says Saddam is trying to win a Mogadishu-style battle without Mogadishu-type popular support, which isn’t real bright.

From a relative in Iraq, some (newswire) pictures of how the troops are catching a few winks here and there. His comment: “Look at these poor bastards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is the reason we all sleep in a bed at night with no worries.”

…Michael Ignatieff, a longtime human rights investigator, wrote of “14,000 ‘writers, academics, and other intellectuals — many of them my friends — [who] published a petition against the war . . . condemning the Iraqi regime for its human rights violations and supporting ‘efforts by the Iraqi opposition to create a democratic, multi-ethnic, and multireligious Iraq.’ ” But they say, he adds, that waging war at this time is “morally unacceptable.”

“I wonder,” Ignatieff wrote — as I also wonder — “what their support for the Iraqi opposition amounts to.”

Why I Didn’t March This Time by Nat Hentoff

Random Jottings has an interesting take on contemporary spirituality:

One of the things that’s bugging me right now (There are a LOT of things bugging me right now) is how so many “Christians” seem to be saying that the most important thing is to avoid the risk of death. Isn’t it a bit…odd? I have little-enough faith myself, I’m not going to make any bold pronouncements here. But the dissonance is getting to me.

He’s right.

Just a little wartime cheer: Civilians flee Basra as paramilitaries brace for last stand

Civilians fleeing Iraq’s main southern city of Basra said increasingly desperate Iraqi fighters were preparing for a last stand against a swelling force of British troops and tanks being readied to fight their way in.

Many of the hundreds streaming out of the city over a bridge leading south said the Iraqi soldiers, paramilitaries and Baath party members loyal to President Saddam Hussein who have held off the coalition forces since the start of the war nearly two weeks ago were trying to stop the exodus.

“They believe that if Basra empties of civilians it will be easy for the foreign troops to take the city,” one man said, echoing the comments of many.

and:

Iraqis Welcome U.S. Marines in Shatra
Monday, March 31, 2003 11:43 a.m. ET
By Sean Maguire

SHATRA, Iraq (Reuters) – Hundreds of Iraqis shouting “Welcome to Iraq” greeted Marines who entered the town of Shatra Monday after
storming it with planes, tanks and helicopter gunships.

A foot patrol picked its way through the small southern town, 20 miles north of the city of Nassiriya, after being beckoned in by a
crowd of people.

“There’s no problem here. We are happy to see Americans,” one young man shouted.

and on our friends the peaceniks, Julie Burchill writes in The Guardian:

What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people. But even those whose anti-war protests started in good faith now know that when Saddam’s regime comes tumbling down, thousands of Iraqis will dance and sing with joy before the TV cameras, and thank our armed forces for giving them back their lives.

Links via Command Post, I think.

From Dean Esmay, Ken Joseph tells what he learned from asking actual Iraqis about the war:

“We are not afraid of the American bombing. They will bomb carefully and not purposely target the people. What we are afraid of is Saddam Hussein and what he and the Baath Party will do when the war begins. But even then we want the war. It is the only way to escape our hell. Please tell them to hurry. We have been through war so many times, but this time it will give us hope”.

He’s gonna be on Baba Wawa this week, apparently.

Command Post notes:

U.S. Controls Terror Camp in Iraq

WASHINGTON – American forces are searching a terrorist compound in northeastern Iraq (news – web sites) that was probably the site where militants made a biological toxin, traces of which were later found by police in London, the Pentagon (news – web sites)’s top general said Sunday.

U.S. and British forces now control the compound, which belongs to the group Ansar al-Islam, said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, describing it as a site “where Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaida had been working on poisons.”

“We think that’s probably (from) where the ricin that was found in London came,” he told CNN’s “Late Edition.” “At least the operatives and maybe some of the formulas came from this site.”

Nope, there’s no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda at all, folks, none whatsoever, and Iraq has no WMDs. It’s all a big snow job. Saddam is a good man, and he likes puppies, kittens, and little old ladies (for testing Ricin).