al-Zarqawi, enjoy your stay in hell

[MJZiggy]

probably not, and unless there is a serious statement made this "war on terror" in Iraq will continue for more time than all of us want.

Too late.

[hurleyfan]

probably not, and unless there is a serious statement made this "war on terror" in Iraq will continue for more time than all of us want.

Too late.

You're right Ziggy, it has gone on too long!

I support the troops and what they are trying to accomplish, I'm saddened it's gone this far.

Although getting this dick head now is a feather in our cap, it is also too late! It never should've gone this far. If we had made a statement on 9/12/2001 (read Iraq & Afghanisthan = sandbox) these fucking nut jobs wouldn't be as powerful as they are, we wouldn't have to worry about "do they become matrys" if we kill them. Their game would've been done the day after it was started..

[Little Whiskey]

okay hurley i'll try to reason with you. remember i am the gun toteing, flag waving, NRA card carrying, 2nd Ammend. preaching redneck. and after 9-11 i was all for making that place a parking lot and middle East-USA, but think for a minute what you are saying. if we do to their innocent what a couple (maybe hundred or thousand) extremests did to our innocent. how does that make us any better or bring justice to anything. it makes us the terrorests. so we go out there to bring the wrongdoers to justice. granted i don't mind if that justice is the barrel of an M-16 or a 500lb facesaving sidewinder, but justice. we hold our leaders and country to a higher moral code than these terrorist.

I think the reason this war is going longer than people want (what war was the really the right length) is the fact that we are fighting a new style of combat. we have never really seen anything like this before. urban warfare, suicide bombers, you don't really know who is or who isn't the enemy. and for that reason, when a pregnant lady in a minivan full of kids drives thru a roadblock, i don't blame the troops who give the orders to light it up. granted i hope i am never in that position because i don't know how i would sleep at night.

[hurleyfan]

LW,
good points, and I don't argue with your beliefs. However, my thoughts & feelings are, if you are the biggest baddest bully in the neighborhood, and some punk comes up and hits you in the nose, what do you do?

Run home to think about "what do I do" so this doesn't happen again? I surely don't want this punk to think he can do what he wants and think I am scared. I'm going to keep nipping at your heels (and allies and beliefs) and see what you are going to do about it!

I want to re-establish my dominance, I'm the king of the hill, and if you punch me in the nose, I'm gonna kick you in the nuts and give you a beat down.. This is my town / world, and I am not going to live in fear of these little guys who hide in caves and throw stones when my back is turned and hide behind women and children.

I'm just saying this whole mess could've been done by noon on 9/12/2001 if we had taken appropriate action against the "punk" that attacked the United States of America! They attacked US and we did nothing to retaliate and protect our children!

Remember what happened the last time a punk attacked our country? I still say Japan and Germany should be speaking English!!

[packerpete]

umm hurley, it took a little while to actually square away who was really responsible for the 911 attacks. It really didnt take that long before we were dropping bombs on caves and cavemen in Afganistan.

even then, Iraq wasnt implicated factually immediately, so next day parking lot installation may have been a little hasty.

i dont have a problem with the timing or beginning of either facet of the beginning of the war on terror, Afganistan initially and Iraq later on. I have a bit of a problem with the ceasing of "military operations" and the initiation of "police operations" before we were through rooting out the shitheads.

Our boys are still in mortal danger there, there are still hostiles concentrated in known areas, I am all for a civil warning, then air raids and helicopter assaults until every last one of the "insurgents" joins this piece of zaquari trash on the highway to hell.

I blame politicians from both sides of the aisle for politicizing a military action. Once the politicians agree that action gets taken and end points defined, they oughta step aside until the Military leaders call "job finished".

While I am at it, why hasnt our gutless leader given an ultamatem to Iran about keeping their noses out of Iraq business while our troops are there, or our troops will become their problem as well. I hear every two bit dictator leveling threats at the US, I am a little tired of it, we really need to take out a few of these big mouths, especially amahdinejad and hugo chavez, followed by that old bag of crap castro. just for starters. Then we let the Israelis defend themselves and finally, get the hell out of the stupid and ineffective united nations. Good lord, are our forefathers spinning in their graves or what?

[Scott Campbell]

Maybe his head was the only thing that was left and that was easy to "pretty up".

tyler

Maybe it's Maybelline.

[Little Whiskey]

LW,
good points, and I don't argue with your beliefs. However, my thoughts & feelings are, if you are the biggest baddest bully in the neighborhood, and some punk comes up and hits you in the nose, what do you do?

Run home to think about "what do I do" so this doesn't happen again? I surely don't want this punk to think he can do what he wants and think I am scared. I'm going to keep nipping at your heels (and allies and beliefs) and see what you are going to do about it!

I want to re-establish my dominance, I'm the king of the hill, and if you punch me in the nose, I'm gonna kick you in the nuts and give you a beat down.. This is my town / world, and I am not going to live in fear of these little guys who hide in caves and throw stones when my back is turned and hide behind women and children.

I'm just saying this whole mess could've been done by noon on 9/12/2001 if we had taken appropriate action against the "punk" that attacked the United States of America! They attacked US and we did nothing to retaliate and protect our children!

Remember what happened the last time a punk attacked our country? I still say Japan and Germany should be speaking English!!

you've got it right on the first part. you go after HIM and kick HIM in the nuts. you don't go after the little old lady that lives scared for her life, next to HIM. that is exactly what we did. Granted we made some mistakes along the way, since we didn't want to start WWIII. But we are sleeping in the bed we made and kick more ass then the media would let on.

on your second thought about Japan and Germany speaking English. We tried that before. at the end of WWI. Guess what that lead to. WWII. Because our leaders realized the mistakes of our history, they didn't want to be doomed to repeat it. So we have made attempts to make our "conquered" countries, our allies. The US has realized that it is a bad government that makes a country evil, not the common people.

[Harlan Huckleby]

Letterman: "Do you think it's too soon to be hitting on Mrs. Zarqawi?"

[Deputy Nutz]

I think his mom, 6 wives, and 8 daughters should be introduced to the fun loving american meat stick.

[Tony Oday]

Agreed I said this all along let Isreal defend itself, bye-bye UN in present form its based of post WWII power.

What these people in Iraq and Afganistan need is jobs. Put them to work for good wages rebuilding their country. This way they have no need to sit around all day in their squalor bitching about the US and their movie star life styles.

The US is in a new war where we dont know who to blast back to the stone age. But when we find them the big stick comes out!

[Anti-Polar Bear]

An eloquent and liberal article from the Washington Post:

A Chilling Portrait, Unsuitably Framed
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer

The frame surrounding an image of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's head, revealed to the world as proof the terrorist is dead, is bizarre. When the picture was displayed at a U.S. military news briefing, Zarqawi's face was seen inside what appeared to be a professional photographic mat job, with a large frame, as if it were something one might preserve and hang on the wall next to other family portraits. One function of frames is to bound an image, and close down its open edges; frames delimit, both physically and by extension, metaphorically. But that was the last thing this frame was doing.

Even as the news was greeting a sleepy America, bursting forth on the morning talk programs and racing around the Internet, the meaning of Zarqawi's death was anything but closed. Virtually no one outside the Iraqi insurgency and other jihadists thought his death was a bad thing, though reports came in that members of Zarqawi's Jordanian family, who had publicly distanced themselves from the killer after he brought his violence to hotels in Amman, were grieving.

In this country, a familiar dynamic played out. Supporters of the war cheered, and criticized the war's opponents (by now a sizable majority of Americans) if they didn't cheer, too. More cautious voices broached the idea -- though at the peril of having their patriotism questioned -- that this may not be the desired turning point in the conflict. They reminded us that we had already seen similar photographs of Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein's dead sons, and that Saddam's capture was also supposed to be the beginning of the end of the mayhem.

So will this image, given a strange dignity by its prominent frame, be a defining image of the war? Not likely. Its primary function is forensic. It proves, in an age of skepticism (heightened by a three-year history of official claims about the war turning out to be false), that Zarqawi is indeed dead. But beyond that, the image has little power. Indeed, as with so many images in this war, it is loaded with the potential to backfire.

Among the dissenting voices in the hubbub yesterday were those worried about Zarqawi's status as a martyr. And here, again, the frame plays a very odd role. In many traditions, a framed picture of the deceased suggests something like an icon, something to be venerated. Photographs of journalists photographing the image at the news briefing showed Zarqawi's face looming above them. One might believe, for a moment, that they had gathered to bask in its exalted presence.

The image itself, a disembodied head, connects this event to the abject misery that Zarqawi had brought to so many people in Iraq over the course of his deadly career. He was the one who reportedly sawed off the head of Nicholas Berg, and now Zarqawi's head was appearing, lifeless, eyes closed, as if it too were somehow detached from his body. For those who want revenge, the head of Zarqawi is a welcome sight; but it reminds others how much this war has been about cycles of killing, retribution, tribal and sectarian violence, and the most primitive destructive urges.

When the White House decided to "roll out a new product" (former chief of staff Andrew Card's phrase) three years ago, the looming war was sold as urgent, with little doubt that it would be fast and clean. We would be liberators; the war would pay for itself. And now we gaze on Zarqawi's face one last time, as he reminds us that the new product wasn't so new; the war turned out to have all too much of what wars have always had in them, death, destruction and chaos. Zarqawi's head forces us to confront once again the most primitive dynamic of war: It's an eye for an eye, or a head for a head.

The framed image of a head also has a disturbing sense of the trophy to it -- proof of another small victory brought home from battle -- which connects it to what might be called the ultimate self-destructing image of victory: the "Mission Accomplished" photo-op staged on an aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003. Even before the war had definitively turned sour, that single image established a pattern. The war would be politicized.

What began as a war of necessity, premised on the slam-dunk certainty that Saddam Hussein was staring us down with weapons of mass destruction, eventually became a war of ideas. If there were no weapons, then at least it was a war of liberation, bringing freedom and democracy to a land in desperate need of both. And when that war devolved into clouds of dust and pools of blood as the country broke into religious and ethnic factions, and the rule of law was extinguished by terrorists and militias, the war of ideas began to seem more like another thing -- a war of trophies.

We may not have victory. Iraq may be a living hell both for those who are fighting to make it better and for those who live there. But we bring home the occasional politically expedient marker of "progress." Major combat operations are over. We got Saddam's sons. We got Saddam. Now we have Zarqawi. The trophy case fills: elections, a constitution, a new government -- everything but peace and stability for an exhausted nation of Iraqis who have died by the tens of thousands during the evolution of this war.

Zarqawi is gone and good riddance. But there's nothing in the image of his face that deserves a frame. It's a small thing, to be sure. But it suggests a cynicism about this war that is profoundly distressing. Our political and military leaders simply can't resist packaging the war and wrapping it up in a bow.

[swede]

Another reason 9 out of 10 dead fish dislike being wrapped up in the Washington Post. When life gives you roses, get a close-up of the aphid.

[Little Whiskey]

I read a little blurb on yahoo that he actually survived the bomb blasts. He was alive for a short time. i didn't read the whole article, but it gave me a smile that hopefully he didn't go with out a little anguish!

[packerpete]

every word of that washington post diatribe i read made me sicker and sicker.

I cannot believe the scum that compose text for that rag are allowed to breathe the free air of the USA.

[Anti-Polar Bear]

every word of that washington post diatribe i read made me sicker and sicker.

I cannot believe the scum that compose text for that rag are allowed to breathe the free air of the USA.

You must be a conservative fuck, Pete.

The Washington Post is not only one of the best newspaper out there, but also one of the most liberal. It is one of my favorite newspaper.

If you dont like the post, go read the Times. The Washington Time is as conservative as a consevative fuck.