How many innocent folks died in the bomb on Zarqawi?

[dogindia]

How can we stop this mess? It seems like endless violence. Would it not have been better to go in a get the man? It is not that this man should not have been stopped.

Bob Herbert's editorial today ends with

When it all finally comes to an end (according to President Bush, on somebody else's watch) we'll look around at the hideous costs in human treasure and cold hard cash and ask ourselves: What in the world were we thinking?

Don't know where to find if for free...here is the link for the pay version...too bad the times did this times select thing. Money grubbing.

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/opinion/08herbert.html?hp

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Better yet.... go look up how many restaurants and other sundry

items were disappeared trying to get Saddam before the actual fireworks began.... my oh my.

[PATRICK]

2. Is we that powerless?

No attempt was made to capture him? No explanation given? Maybe I missed the obvious questions and answers that are dribbling out a day after the long hunt eneded. Following his spiritual adviser, if you believe that, was enough of a clue to plaster our only lead? It couldn't have been concern for the safety of locals, but it may have been that we simply are incapable of picking anyone up. One less dangerous person in fact was lately picked up that may logically may have been a key source for the denouement.

Yet this was a marginalized dethroned Al Qaeda leader at odds with most Iraqi factions. At the bidding of these people perhaps, the last thing anyone wanted was his capture with all that info and they preferred not to be the executioners, not the Sunnis or his own group. The Americans, for slight PR advantage and eliminating one bombing cell at least(which is what Zarqawi had recently been reduced to) follow the script even to eliminating ALL the confederates and evidence. What kind of deal was that and is that what Bush is reduced to to get the PR props he needs? They only got this guy at the exact moment when he became demoted and a loud inconvenience. The timing of the tape indicates this sort of crisis and climax.

When the Israelis bomb someone it is not in their controlled lands but in places where they cannot go and pick someone up. Apparently this is what we are reduced to and what the WH wants in the castling, air strike phase of our own occupation. As if to celebrate this model Israel knocks off a guy in the same way that seems logically only in connection with supporting Bush. What seems a confirmation of smart strategy in effect works for most people perhaps, but it brought the question immediately to my mind that they don't want to discuss capture option of the few people with any real value as prisoners.

Pulverizing any individual fighter will not end the war. The only war that matters to Bush is the war against the human will for truth, peace and justice.

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. According to a Reuters report he was still alive

when the US turned him over to Iraqi custody.

There were six people, including a woman and young child, killed in the attack.


edit: I originally misread the story and thought the Iraqis turned him over to us.

[Igel]

4. That report was filed early.

Only a few hours after the event. I'm not sure that the stringer got it right. He may have; but a bit of skepticism on that point is warranted.

[DoYouEverWonder]

5. Same thing happened when they captured Saddam

The first reports came out of Iran and they claimed that the Kurds had captured him and then turned him over to the Americans. Of course, that didn't make the Americans look good, and they needed a better story to go along with the photo op of them pulling him out of his hidey hole.

[PATRICK]

6. the story that dissatisfies

The police work details they spend so much time on gloating and speculating in triumph. Then they kill the big prize and conduct seventeen raids on leftover leads. They credit the Sunni insurgents they have been trying to "work with" and are giving someone 25 million dollars, presumably to continue Sunni insurgent charity work. This is obviously jarring some correspondents looking back at the time when this incendiary target had been protected by conscious WH neglect, but of course nowhere in the main MSM story do the details trouble our "journalists" and the main perception is passed on as the whole cloth reality to the public. Almost all the damage Zarqawi, dead man walking, could have done had been completed and I suppose they tired of waiting for his Euro network to roust Europe.

If the Sunnis convinced or dealt with the Americans to kill Zarqawi and any move to capture him would be thwarted and drastically ruin their to-date search efforts that makes some imaginary, albeit humiliating sense. Instruments of his inevitable demise give the Sunnis what they want, the martyr Al Qaeda wants and 25 big ones for the coffers. All without doing more than scratch any of the networks. Everyone gets a little something, the war continues unabated.

News by guesswork. Better than reading detective novels I suppose.