If Uday and Qusay are actually dead, what are the future ramifications?

[Milum]

Opening Query --> If Uday and Qusay are actually dead, what are the future ramifications?

Oh Beagle, wishes really do come true. Uday and Qusay are actually dead.
And here we are discussing the ramifications.

My wish is irrelevant. We deal in cold, hard facts around here, not Republican porn.

No** Minty**, your wish is never irrelevant. Your wish is relative. Someone’s cold hard facts are someone else’s Republican porn.

What kind of silly reasoning is that? Wishing things does not make them so. Or are you saying that if we all wish hard enough things will happen the way we wish them to happen? Because if that were true the invasion would not have happened in the first place.

No Sailor just wishing does not make things so. You must wish with a** pure heart**. And you calling a liberation an invasion is not likely to endear you with the good wish fairy now is it? Remember, a lot of nice people were wishing for the iraqi people to be freed.

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Meanwhile I’m wondering…would it break your jaw to wish our troops good luck?

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[Beagle]

Well, given the apparent hydra we are fighting it’s nice to have two heads lopped off. Some of the violence was and is being perpetrated by Fedayeen loyalists. It seems apparent that al Qaeda and other Islamists are trying to turn Iraq into our Afghanistan. Saddam is running around somewhere.

Meanwhile, we’re diddling with the French and Germans. Pommes frites, anyone?

If that’s what it takes to get this damn reconstruction, Iraqi control, and pacification into high gear. Rumsfeld ridiculed, spelling at my peril, Shinseki’s prediction that it would take 300,000 troops to occupy Iraq. Seemed reasonable to me at the time. That’s not chutzpah, that’s quite possibly stretching our troops out and getting them killed.

So, my take on my thread, Uday and Qusay are nice to have dead. We have more work to go than we’ve done.

[Beagle]

Let me make myself perfectly clear. In the third paragraph above,

“Iraqi control” = “control by Iraqis”

That needs to be accelerated as per, gasp what the French think. I don’t know when it should happen exactly, but Iraq is not for the US, France, Russia, Germany, or any SC member to rule over the long term.

[ElvisL1ves]

*Originally posted by Beagle *
**Well, given the apparent hydra we are fighting it’s nice to have two heads lopped off.

Interesting metaphor there. You do know what the Hydra did when a head was lopped off, don’t you?

[PatriotX]

**Iraqis’ Bitterness Is Called Bigger Threat Than Terror**

New intelligence assessments are warning that the United States’ most formidable foe in Iraq in the months ahead may be the resentment of ordinary Iraqis increasingly hostile to the American military occupation, Defense Department officials said today.

They said it was a mistake for the administration to discount the role of ordinary Iraqis who have little in common with the groups Mr. Rumsfeld cited, but whose anger over the American presence appears to be kindling some sympathy for those attacking American forces.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

**Attackers United By Piety in Plot To Strike Troops **

But in this Sunni Muslim town colored in shades of brown and intersected by canals of open sewage, Fahdawi and the others who died are celebrated as heroes. Neighbors and relatives call them defenders of faith, not supporters of former president Saddam Hussein. And in their words, actions and ideas, relatives say, the men represent a homegrown movement, grounded in a militant reading of religion, that augurs a new enemy for the occupation.

“The young people are waking up. I saw it with my brother and cousin,” he said. “They’re not Baathists, they’re not party members. They did it for God. When they saw the Americans come, raid the houses, steal from the people, they didn’t accept it.”

• © 2003 The Washington Post Company*