Here is some real news that the big media missed so far, straight from the horse’s mouth:
Abdul Al Aal Batat, known as “the lion of the marshes” because of his ferocious reputation or, alternatively, as “the man Saddam looked to for all of Southern Iraq”, was captured by the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment (QLR) in Basra last week.
He was a leading player in Saddam’s regime on the civil side, right hand man to Chemical Ali and known for killing and torturing his employees. As part of Saddam’s close circle through a connection to Saddam’s brother-in-law, he grew rich on sanction busting, smuggling, owning a lot of property around Basra on behalf of the Ba’ath party. Although just below the level of the pack of cards, he knew Saddam personally.
Until last week he was a leading criminal player, heavily involved in extortion from businesses courtesy of his tribal links from the smuggling side. He is believed to have been probably the top Former Regime Loyalist left in the south, funding and directing most of the anti-CF activity from their side in Basra (although not all of it).
He was caught by one of the QLR VCP’s (Vehicle Check Points) because his bodyguard was armed. He was then recognised by Int despite trying to grow his beard and change his dress. This is the biggest catch in the British AO (area of operations) and into the British detention facility at Umm Quasar since the end of the war.
Finally, they captured someone who has actually been running a lot of anti-coalition forces activities. It is always good news when they capture the pack of cards criminals but post-war some of the big fish are not in the pack of cards. Getting rid of the ones who are causing disruption right now may be doing more for the everyday lives of ordinary Iraqis.
Update: The QLR Media Ops Officer is John Ainley, at BASRA. The official media links should have his contact details.
Captured in a car with no shooting? What a weird and particularly English way to take a dangerous civilian into custody.
I can’t understand why our friends didn’t simply follow the chap home and the put a tow missile throught the window and then storm the house with 200 soldiers. It has worked in other situations…
Perhaps they don’t have the technology or the command and control systems needed for such an operation. What is with the British Army can’t they do any thing right?
Next time, when they find a high ranking Ba’athist in a car, I recommend they follow the tried and tested proceedure of withdrawing and calling down air support. All this “softly, softly approach” and “would you like to come with us, Sir” its just not, err, well its just not good television. It makes the troops look as though they are involved in some sort of anti-war/peace keeping mission.
They’ve got the ammo – why don’t they use it?
Good job to the Brits – I wonder why we don’t hear more on this in the major outlets… no, no I really don’t.
Mad Dog,
They didn’t shoot because they weren’t shot at. Now you can argue about the reasons why they weren’t shot at, (British approach to policing, Shia thanks for freedom, overwhelming force at the checkpoint, etc), but your generalization about the US troops is gratuitous.
Mad Dog:
With respect to the Uday and Qusay situation, a small number of Yank soldiers attempted to walk, in broad daylight, in plain sight, to the door of the house the brothers were at. They were fired on, and three were wounded.
After the troops were fired on, the situation was treated as a combat situation.
Was that proper?
Well, smart folks heed a saying (coined by Colin Powell in his days as a General officer): “In a difference of opinion between the commander in the field and the rear echelon, the commander in the field is always right until proven otherwise.”
You can sit on your soft, furry butt in the rear echelon and second-guess the commander in the field, but I’ll go with what General Powell said. The commander in the field made a decision, and the situation ended well for all (except Uday, Qusay, and those, apparently like you, who wish they were still around to raise havoc).
In any event, all’s swell that ends swell.
Cheers.
MrCurious,
Thank you for taking the time to read my comments. I always appreciate feedback when bored in a hot office.
In what way do you feel that I have made gratuitous genralizations about US troops?
I thought I was discussing the Brits and had not specifically mentioned the Americans.
Oh, the guys with the TOW and the two companies of soldiers. No that’s not a gratuitous generalisation that was fact. Err, see Dissident Frogmans graphic reconstruction for more details. Except he doesn’t show all 200 grunts for space and security reasons.
As for “post conflict reconstruction work” promised by the allied administration – I didn’t personally think it should have been “generalised” to include the Quasay’s and Uday’s faces. They looked better in the “before” picture – certainly so if one was trying to convince sceptics that they had been killed. But that is another story…
…heads up – here’s lunch!
And thanks to Mr RJGator,
He seems to be able to make gratuitous genralisations too! After having read my initial comments he seems to think that I like the Hussein brothers grim. He says, somewhat robustly:
“(except Uday, Qusay, and those, apparently like you, who wish they were still around to raise havoc).”
Well I am impressed by your ability to read between the lines as none of the actual words in my comment infer that I have any love for Mssrs Q. and U. Hussein al Tikriti.
Which part of my comment did you think said this? Please indecate how you arrived at this conclusion or I think an apology would be apropriate. Not, of course, that I would get one…
And as for the tatcics of house fighting used in the attempted extraction Qusay and Uday – didn’t anybody think of smoking them out? The thought od Uday and Qusay dead is not such a bad thing – but Uday and Qusay alive? Now that WOULD have been a prize capture far more useful than two gotesquely made up corpses.
But I am just a stupid armchair general what would I know about any of this….
Hey Mad Dog-
Those Yanks don’t fight fair! You would have stormed the place with only todger in hand cuz you’re a real man.
Perhaps you could serve as a human shield for remaining Ba’ath killers.
Now you know,
JackSheet
Good story, and it deserves to be getting wider coverage. Bit surprised the Big Media outlets aren’t keeping a big running tally of Baath Party officials who have been hauled in. But then I guess that might be construed as positive news for the coalition and we cannot have that, now can we?
Mad Dog – your name is well chosen.
Mad Dog,
You are a coward. You imply all sorts of things but then deny you really said anything.
Disgusting.
Greetings JackSheet,
“You would have stormed the place with only todger in hand cuz you’re a real man.”
False bravado. The object of the exercise was to capture two men and and teenager armed with some guns in a house. Yup they died. Ah well, so it goes. I’m not totally sure how guilty the boy was – but that’s a small formality. However the value of capturing the Hussein brothers alive would have been far greater than recovering two bloody bodies with all the ensuing theatrics.
So the two brothers, et al. armed with AKs put up such a stiff fight and had so much ammunition that the ONLY thing possible to do was toss a TOW through the window. Instantly depriving us of the opertunity to recoup our money by charging the Iraqi population a dollar a go to hit them where it hurts with a baseball bat (oh, didn’t expect that?).
The point being that any stupid person (eg one S. Hussein) could use a big banger to stop the shooting. But one would have hoped that having located the evil duo, the brains behind the biggest army on the planet could think of a way to extract them in any other form than hamburger meat (however “tasty” that idea is the readers of this missive).
And if this wasn’t such a bum point then why go to all the trouble of dressing up the corpses, a thing which even some American military objected to.
“Perhaps you could serve as a human shield for remaining Ba’ath killers.”
Nothing could be further from my mind, why on earth do you think I would want to do that? Having paid my taxes that helped support the Brtish troops in Iraq, I feel that your comments are ENTIRELY unjustified if not a little uncouth sir.
Indeed, now I know…
Johnnathen, why thank you. I’m glad I own something acceptable to the readers of Samizdat.
Innuendo about the way that vaious operations are carried out is unwaranted. Circumstances differ and if a Baathists can be taken without a fight, do it, if they can’t then it has to be done whatever way it can be. We don’t know the details of each case well enough to second-guess the decisions of those who have to get the job done. Well done to anyone involved in clearing up any of the regime big wheels.
And if during this ‘smoking out’ process you so expertly describe, what if the Husseins had escaped? What if a GI was killed? Certainly these were very real risks in such an operation. How, exactly, are you qualified to second guess the decision made on the field with the bullets wizzing by and troops already being medevaced out?
Gee, our military is so stupid! What in the hell are they doing addressing different situations in different manners, when they could use mad dog’s one-size-fits-all approach?
I mean, really, why should two men in a stopped car at a military checkpoint be handled any differently than an unknown number of suspects in a large home in a potentially hostile neighborhood with possible means of escape be handled differently?
One point to consider:
When the U.S. troops approached the Uday and Quasy house and received fire, they did not know how many people were in the house. It would be difficult to just ask “Excuse me, people shooting at us from in the house. How many of there are you???”
Given the fact that the troops could not ascertain how many people were actually in the house, I would rather have them bring WAY too much firepower and worry about the fairness of it all later.
Just a point.
Greetings Kevin,
“You are a coward.”
Which is a bit rich comming from a person sitting behind a computer terminal. Get my address off Perry and come and say that to me in person! We’ll see if I’m a coward then…
“You imply all sorts of things but then deny you really said anything.”
This is a rather subjectively illogical argument. What do you feel I implied and when did you feel I denied I said anything? From the amount of words above I seems I have said a lot and very little seems to be contradicted by my later scribblings.
Any meaning that is “implied” is only interpreted as such by the listener. It would therefore be difficult for me to deny what I had not actually said. You have interpreted my comments to have some implecation without giving us the benfit of what you think I am implying. How can I judge if you have understood me correctly. Then you say I deny saying anything, which is too much of a genralisation to be usefully meaningful here. I am not sure pleading the fifth has much use on a Blog…
Of course you might be trying to say something like, “Urgh you remind me of a detestable lefty statist which leaves me with a nasty feeling”, in which case I am glad you can form such deep rooted oppinions without meeting me – but you’d still be wrong about two things!
“Disgusting.”
It most certainly is… perhaps you would like the government to do something about it!
Mad Dog – get a copyright on your name!!!!
BTW, no offence meant. I answered your remarks about patents over at the other thread.
One small correction, Mr Dog. “biggest army on the planet” That would be the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 1.8 million active duty Chinese soldiers — plus 1.5 million reservists. But, if you’re counting reserves, then North Korea takes the prize with 1 million active duty and no fewer than 7 million reservists.
By the way: Your smug cynicism over the slaying of Uday and Qusay simply demonstrates that you’re an unthinking tool of the demagogues in the media.
Who was it who recently observed that keeping the brothers alive, even as permanent prisoners, would also have kept alive the possibility (however remote) of a Saddamite succession, thus encouraging die-hard loyalists to fight on?
Mock if you will American heavy-handedness, but it all looks rather different if the US military had been ordered to take Uday and Qusay alive only if they surrendered with absolutely no resistance.
I agree with Mad Dog, the US forces should have waved their magic stick and solved the problem bloodlessly. How many problems has the US gotten into because they seem unwilling to use the magic stick and pixie dust until its too late.
A fair point, “just a point”.
I agree troops on point duty make contact rather than carry out intelligence work. That is done by other units, of which there are many in Iraq. And it is true that the neigbourhood was hostile, it was situated in Iraq after all.
It is fair to point out the actual owner of the house was not all that hostile. Hey, he even had the keys to the house and had nipped over to the local US command centre to tell them who was in.
Of course, in our imaginary world the US officers were too stupid to ask how many people were with the informant in the house and he was too sly to say that a servant and kid were waiting in ambush with the terrible two. You see, he wanted the troops to go in shouting, “Hi Uday we’ve come to liberate you” and then get caught by surprise by an AK47 weilding fourteen year old. And the plan worked so successfully that the US is going to pay him an enormous wedge of all those taxes you keep complaining about. However back to reality…
I am not particularly worried about the “fairness of it all”. And I am not in the habbit of making excuses for Hussein family. Even when some members of the current US administration were slapping him on the back and calling him a “bulwark against the tyranny of Isamic fundamentalism”. I have personally considered Saddam a total shit head since 1983 when his true personality became obvious to me.
No, it is not the fairness of the result that I am bothered about too much (although it does raise questions) nor is it the fact that the US administration feels that it has the right to hunt down and shoot anyone it feels is a threat.
It is the fact that the worlds most advanced thinking, most highly equiped and modern army could not get four people out of a building of which it held TOTAL control without the need to distroy the building and its occupants. Other commentators might say, “but they shot at the US troops” or “they were scum who should have been strangled at birth” and that may be true. But where in the rule book does it say that the only response is to flatten the building or that the mission must be over in one hour and so on. What was the rush?
It was may or may not have been necessary to kill Quday and Uday (they were probably bound for a rope even if they had been captured). But my respect for the professional capabilities of an army is greater when they really do the difficult thing. In this case would have been to bring out the culprits bound and gagged so that vital intelligence can be gathered. Intelligence that may eventually save the lives of many more soldiers. And after they had been interogated they could be given a fair trial.
There would be no need for corpse parading and the rule of law (remember that) could have been shown to have overcome all.
And as for the commentators that say there was no other way. Err, well read the original article and see how the British army does it. No TOW, no assault troops. Just “you’re nicked, sonny boy, come with us”.
And how would I know anything. Well my brother in law is actually stationed in Basra with the British Army. And has been for the last two months.
John Armitt’s comment above tries to inject some common sense into the intramural sniping and second-guessing here.
We’re, what, 37 out of 55 on that deck of cards? So what if the Hussain brothers went down the hard way or the Brits nab a major troublemaker without a shot. Let’s leave etiquette to the diplomats and keep the focus where it belongs — running these assholes to ground.
As for we spectators of the war here in blogdom, perhaps Red Barber said it best: “The fans always play the game better than the players.” And fortunately, as with invective hurled by bleacher bums from the safety of their seats, uninformed commentary and wisdom after the fact will have zero impact on the outcome of the game.
Mad Dog,
Your said, “Get my address off Perry and come and say that to me in person! We’ll see if I’m a coward then…”
Your tough talk is empty … and pathetic. Give me your name and address NOW, you twit (and stop hiding behind Perry). The next time I’m in the UK (if that’s where you are from) I’ll be glad to stop by.
What in hell does “subjectively illogical” mean? That you are a pretentious bore? Cut the crit lit argument, you know exactly what I meant.
You also said, “Any meaning that is ‘implied’ is only interpreted as such by the listener.” That’s such utter crap. If you don’t recognize that it is utter crap, you are either 5 years old or a lunatic.
Have a nice day.
Hey maddog,
The beauty of killing Uday and Qusay is that they won’t be murdering anyone ever again.
The Brits should have had the balls to blow away their guy.
I agree with Yank.
“Of course, in our imaginary world the US officers were too stupid to ask how many people were with the informant in the house and he was too sly to say that a servant and kid were waiting in ambush with the terrible two.” — mad dog barker
The military handled the situation incorrectly. They should have just taken the word of the informant as truth. I don’t know if the informant was asked about the number of people in the house, but if he WAS asked, they should have accepted that as fact. They also should not assume that during the time the informant was talking to them, that people may have been entering or leaving the house.
“It is the fact that the worlds most advanced thinking, most highly equiped and modern army could not get four people out of a building of which it held TOTAL control without the need to distroy the building and its occupants. Other commentators might say, “but they shot at the US troops” or “they were scum who should have been strangled at birth” and that may be true. But where in the rule book does it say that the only response is to flatten the building or that the mission must be over in one hour and so on. What was the rush?” — mad dog barker
Obviously, the army had TOTAL control of the house. The should have used their total control to isolate and disarm the combatants (the magic stick would have helped prevent casualties). It is stupid for them to be suspicious of the property. Obviously, no sane fugitive would attempt to booby trap the premise with exposives or mines or anything deadly. Also, what WAS the rush? There is no possibility for Saddam loyalists to have gotten word and try to mount a counter attack. They should have just sat outside the house and waited for the combatants to run out of resources and just surrender. Either that or use the magic stick.
FYI, I would have used the magic stick. 😉
Mad Puppy:
Well, I know something about Iraq, too: My cousin’s girlfriend’s sister’s best friend is stationed in Bagdad!
I am THE expert. (Bow before me.)
Mad Dog has been too long in the noon day sun. It’s broiled what little gray matter he had.
Mad Dog says, “Well my brother in law is actually stationed in Basra with the British Army. And has been for the last two months.”
Well, then, obviously you are an expert, fully as qualified as the Yank commander on the ground to make decisions respecting the use of force. How silly of me to have thought you were just a pompous windbag REMF critic. I mean, if your brother-in-law is there, and has been for two whole months, then that makes you…oh. That’s right. It makes you nothing.
On a serious note, though, the two situations (the roadblock and the house) were probably quite inapposite. Comparing them is apples and oranges, so why do it? The troops and their commanders in both cases apparently acted perfectly appropriately, and as I noted above, that is what I am going assume unless the REMFs are proven right.
RJGator
Sergeant
U.S. Army
5th Special Forces Group, Airborne
12th Special Forces Group, Airborne
Mad Dog has certainly made a lot of noise.
A few points here:
1) It appears that the seige lasted so long because the idiot brothers spent most of the time on cell and/or satellite phones. Great intel opportunity!
2) They were given opportunities to surrender AFTER they had wounded four (not three) Americans. The Americans had entered the house and received fire. Three were wounded inside and one outside.
3) After softening up the building with small arms for a while, troops again went into the building. They were hit by fire from a fortified position on the second floor. The left.
4) Only after all of that was the heavy weaponry (rockets and missiles) deployed.
5) The teenager survived the attack and fired on soldiers when the entered the third time. At that point, they killed him.
Now, it is obvious that the Army didn’t place an extremely high value on capturing these guys alive, or they would have sacrified more troops trying to grab them, and would have used some Delta force trickery (wait until night, toss in flashbangs, rappel in from above, etc).
Regarding the original purpose of this thread… I suspect that this didn’t make major press because they are focussed on the hunt for Saddam, up north.
Nice to hear good news out of Iraq.
Greetings fellow agonists,
Well I am glad to have provoked such a discussion and I am enlightened with the knowledge that I am totally wrong and so many of my fellow comentators are totally right. Thanks for sorting that bit out.
I must say some of the arguments are a bit thin, but why dwell on the details. I have written to Kevin so we can meet up when he next visits Blighty. No, no, nothing macho, I offered to buy the beers over which to contiunue our deliberations. Yes, yes everyone is invited…
I note the points made by Mr Moore and Sergeant Gator, and others. I respect your opinions and accept that there is a plurality of explanations for everything. Some of the points are quite persuasive but others seem amount to flag waving/chest thumping. “They was guilty as hell and deserved to die”, might be true but it probably is not rational and anyway it would be best shown by due process.
The big bad brothers are dead now and I would not vote to bring them back. But before the end of the year many more will probably be dead too. Iraqis, both nice and nasty, Americans and British will probably die before peace will come, if it ever does.
So if I ask “why” it is not because I support the Ba’ath Party or any muderous government regime. It is because I value life. I understand that sometimes one has to take drastic action with a less than agreeable outcome and lives can be lost. But to suggest that it is reasonable to kill someone because one doesn’t agree with them or because they don’t do what you want them to. Well, there lies a dangerous path. One on which I will only walk with extreme caution and more than a little discomfort.
Hah – time to go home and get a life…they say it will be cooler tomorrow.
>>> The object of the exercise was to capture two men and and teenager armed with some guns in a house.
Who told you that? The US doesn’t play by Euro-mamby-pamby rules anymore, not since 9/11. When we want someone dead, they die. When we want them alive, we take them.
You’d think after two, count ’em, TWO world wars you’d have learned about something about not playing footsie with people that want you dead, but apparently not.
They died because we didn’t wanna hear the spineless French and their pusillanimous brethren shrieking about how unfairly the mass murderers were being treated (like you are), and how this underscores the need for a World Court, blah blah blah.
Evil men died. Good. I hope a lot more will follow them. Doing the heavy lifting that keeps everyone safe will always be a thankless job, I guess.
Do you speak Russian? You’re welcome.
“Me and the French”? Well, whatever.
Personally I have never forgiven the French for attacking the British navy off Cheasapeak Bay. We could have won the war back then if the damned French hadn’t intervened and split the Anglosphere in two. But its all water under the bridge now.
Do I speak Russian? No I usually speak slowly but I have learned to say, “Da! Tovarich” to amuse my American friends. I sometimes miss the Soviets. I blame the sights but it is true when they were around they gave Osama something better to concentrate on. Now we pay for it all and they are laughing into their caviar bowls. Except for the ones in Chechnya (or was it Dagesthan).
CONGRATS TO the QLR!! Way to go!!
It disgusts me news like this is either not mentioned or mentioned in passing on page 10.
Hope he yields lots of info. and his capture helps to demoralize more ‘Saddamites’.
About Uday and Qusay:
One thing that isn’t widely known, and may explain why the house was taken as it ws:
During a planning session discussing various ways of capturing Saddam’s sons, there were people who favored using enough ordinance to take down 12 city blocks. However, cooler heads prevailed and it was decided only enough for 1 city block was needed. (Don’t want to needlessly waste ordinance on that scum.)
The above on Qusay and Uday is satire, for the satirically impaired. Before anyone flames me, flame for correct reason. I have no problem at in the way the sons were captured. Those a**hole* weren’t worth the life of any coallition member.
Saved a lot of trouble by killing them, in my opinion.
Why you people pay the slightest attention to an idiot troll like barker is beyond me. The article was about some very good news and that is what needs to be discussed, not the prattle of some irrelevent blogroach.
Any contact details? Any URIs? Google and Google News are silent on the matter.
If it came to believing the BBC or believing Samizdata, I know which I’d choose. But that’s not saying much. Please, some second source!
Mad Dog
Your point of view, if what you commented truly reflects it, is pretty obviously that of someone who’s never been in combat. I picture a tall, thin bespectacled liberal with a long, thin nose and a perpetual curmudgeonly scowl, wearing a heavy, brown wool suit in the middle of the Summer and looking down that long, thin nose in contempt at those who risk their lives in order for him to live with a modicum of safety. That’s fine, it’s all part of living in a free country and those of us who fight bad guys in order to preserve your freedom accept that it is your right to embrace your beliefs, no matter how distasteful they may be to us and to the majority of your own fellow citizens.
While a soldier’s job is to fight and often to take mortal risks in the pursuit of an objective, it is also his job to stay alive if at all possible. It is also his commander’s job to do everything in his power to bring his people home at the end of the day.
All of them.
We do not sacrifice our men as part of a strategy, we devise strategies that we feel will accomplish the mission with the best chance of our guys surviving.
We especially do not put our people at risk so that a couple of utter scoundrels can be taken alive. It is far more preferable that men(and I use the term loosely) like Uday and Qusai die than any of our own sustain even a flesh wound.
When someone opens fire on us, we are under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to continue pursuing peaceful means. In fact, in order to protect our men, we are obligated rather to kill the person or persons firing at us as expeditiously as possible and by any means necessary.
Having led(and I mean LED, not ordered) men into lethally violent situations for most of a very long military career, I cannot help but wonder exactly where someone like you is coming from. I can see a man(again, sir, I use the term loosely) who opines as you do giving an order like, “if they open fire, shoot the weapons out of their hands”.
I do think that someone like you, as a means of contributing to the wellbeing of the rest of mankind, could best serve by inserting your head deep into the bowl of the nearest commode and depressing the lever.
Ah, the redolence of pheromones.
As a dippy female, I’d like to suggest that we keep in mind that the Brits and the Yanks are allies in this war in Iraq, and that certain British indiscretions, including photos of a terrified Iraqi POW hoisted atop a fork-lift, were divulged by the media a scant few weeks ago.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that attacks perpetrated against coalition forces by fractious Iraqis and tetchy foreign infiltrators have occurred with significantly greater frequency in the Americans’ area of operations than in the Brits’. There may come a point when circumspection, tidiness, and the niceties of deference to Arab custom assume lesser priority for hot, harried, war-weary troops than that of simply getting a dirty job done. I, for one, continue to rejoice that the gruesome twosome are no longer in the land of the living.
Alan E Brain: Sorry just the one source from an officer who was involved in the operation… There is an official contact for the regiment, so any journalist can pick it up and verify it…
I know Google is silent on that matter, it’s a piece of news directly from the ground and the major media outlets do not seem to be that interested in good news from Iraq… and the guy wasn’t on the pack of cards…
Congrats to the Q.L.R.
I for one am absolutely NOT surprised by the media ignoring good news from iraq, it has been this way since before the start of this conflict and it will probably be this way long after the end of this conflict, the good thing about this is that the blogs have created a positive rol for themselves as a place for unbiased news and frank discussion, and will maybe one day be able to take on the mainstream media
maddogbarker when you are in holland you are most certainly welcome to have a couple of beers and a good discussion at my place
welldefended
When MadDog didn’t have the courage of his convictions sufficient to acknowledge that implications and embedded assumptions are NOT all in the eye of the beholder, I wrote him off as another gutless mouth.
Having read the collected responses, from top to bottom, there DO seem to be significant differences between the responses of those who’ve never stood in harm’s way to protect others, and those who HAVE…
And as for U&Q… now that several days have passed, and even MORE cells and leaders and snipers and anti-coalition fedayeen are being captured, it seems that Americans in Iraq are doing just fine, and every day is another BAD day for the liberal-left.
If he’s not yet insane, Saddam might be well-captured alive, but captured in ANY way is fine. Alive, dead, in small but identifiable pieces…
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
That’s fine, thanks… MORE bad days for the Left!
netwing: well of course there are more attacks in the American areas, that’s where most of the Ba’ath loyalists are. The Brits are handling the south, where folks were very oppressed by Saddam (so were the Kurds, but we got them their own govt. via the no-fly zones after the fuck-up ending of Gulf War I).
So the south where the Brits are is the area where people are most upset with Saddam AND are most upset at the past behaviour of the US. So it makes total sense to have the Brits there, while we take the heat in the north/central area’s where most of the shooting still is.
Oh, just ignore me. I’m an irrelevant blogroach knocking about this end o’ cyberspace…. ;0)
Were you really “pissed off”, Gabrieal? if beer will settle the score I shall offer to buy the first pint. email address from the usual suspect. I am quite willing to explain the reasonable satire in my first comment way above.
Otherwise, never mind I am sure they will capture some more and I promise not to make a peep. On that occaision at least.