But imagine if the St. Peter's Basilica were destroyed by a foreign army of Islamic troops as the first or second option to removing a small band of terrorists - can you imagine the backlash that would produce by Catholics against Islam in general and the country which did this in particular?
Are there any pictures of this thing? From my limited understanding, there is fighting going on in a huge cemetery (2 million graves). Let's say this cemetery surrounds the shrine, right. So, you can't roll armor over a cemetery for obvious reasons. So they have to get through it on foot, but they are dealing with rebels who are scattered all over and using the tombs for cover. So before they can gas the place, they need to get through this: to the shrine: I haven's found a good picture that shows what the layout is, so I have no idea where the shrine is in relation to the cemetery. Actually, if that road in the 2nd pic leads to it, then they can get vehicles up to it. The reports say they have the shrine surrounded, so maybe they are right there. If that's the case, I don't know why they haven't used gas. I hope they try that stuff the Russians used in that hostage situation, it killed hostages, there aren't any hostages in the shrine, so any deaths the gas causes are welcome.
.........On Thursday, the Board of Muslim Clergy, a Sunni fundamentalist organization with substantial support from Sunni Muslims, issued a fatwa or ruling that no Iraqi Muslim may participate in an attack on other Iraqi Muslims in support of the occupying power. That is, even the hard line Sunnis, who mostly don't like Shiites, are siding with Muqtada against Allawi and Rumsfeld on this one............ link
You haven't changed a bit, Glynch. You still pray for America to fall flat on their face and go down in flames, don't you? Admit it. You'd love to see us defeated. You want the terrorists to win and this post proves it. Patriotic Iraqis? No good cause? This idiot's threat to the rule of the Iraqi govt. is a serious problem. We either take him out or fight 20 Al Sadrs and watch Iraq disintergrate into little Mafia-type fiefdoms. We have to take him out. We have no choice and that is cause enough. You are one twisted individual. With citizens like you, who the hell needs Al Queda?
What is happening now in Iraq is exactly what many intelligent individuals said would happen, all out chaos. The U.S. should have taken care of business in Afghanistan and concentrated on Osama. I still think the whole Iraq war revolves around oil. If we are so concerned about oppressed people, why aren't we readying the troops to invade Sudan, or even North Korea. No arguement that Saddam is a murdering S.O.B., but there never was a way to "win" if we occupied Iraq. At this point the U.S. might as well just start working on plans to take over the entire Middle East. We just have to live with the fact that genocide is the only option, because the populace there is never going to accept Western ideals, at least not in our lifetime. We can start by razing Najaf, then Bagdad, next Damascus, then Mecca, Medina and heck, lets take out Jerusalem while we are at it. A clean slate for the whole region and oil for everyone. Halliburton would love that. Half the U.S. would probably support it if we put a religous, born-again Christian spin on it and said we were ridding the world of the non-believers.
And Christians aren't militant? A large portion of the U.S. population has a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.
One of the more telling things is that the neocons are trying to use Sunni troops to kill the ****es in their holy sites. Their appointed guy ex- CIA guy, Allawi, is a Sunni who is helping give a cover to the dirty work. BTW I've seen polls that prior to this Allawi had 1.5% support as a future leader. Bush gang style democracy. The loyal dittoheads proclaiming themselves believers in democracy of course go along. Of course ,ever the Christian hypocrites, the Bush Gang says we must stay in Iraq to keep the groups form killing each other. Like the earlier British imperialists, they play the groups against each other. I'm not sure if the British imperialists then justified their occupation in terms of keeping the groups from fighting with each other.
US Winning Najaf Battle, Losing Iraq War by Jim Lobe Once again, U.S. armed forces appear on the verge of winning a decisive military victory in Iraq – this time in the holy city of Najaf. And once again, they appear closer to losing the larger wars for a stable and friendly Iraq and for an Islamic world that will cease producing anti-U.S. terrorism. That is the rapidly growing concern of Middle East and Islamic specialists as U.S. Marines, after a week of fighting, captured virtually all of central Najaf on Thursday, including the home of Mehdi Army leader Moqtada al-Sadr, and launched a final siege of the Imam Ali mosque, which is considered the world's holiest shrine by some 120 million Shi'ite Muslims. Even as the military commanders and Iraq's interim president, Iyad Allawi, debate whether to wait out Sadr and his armed followers, who are believed to be inside the shrine, or to invade its precincts – preferably with Iraqi troops – the end result is not likely to work in Washington's favor, according to most experts here. Shi'ites "worldwide are shocked and outraged over what is going on in Najaf," Imam Moustafa Al-Qazwini, a prominent Shi'ite leader based in California, told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. "They consider it an assault on the sanctity of Islam and in particular Shia Islam." "Any attack on that city will destroy America's future in Iraq completely," said al-Qazwini, who supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 but became disillusioned with the occupation after several months of traveling to the occupied nation earlier this year. To Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the University of Michigan, the fighting of the past week marks a major setback for Washington's larger political goals. "The credibility of the Allawi government as an independent Iraqi government has been decisively undermined by this," Cole said adding that while much of the Iraqi public was willing to give the interim leader a chance, "he will now be seen as nothing more than an American puppet or, worse, an American agent." That impression is strengthened by the reemergence of U.S. troops and aircraft in the fighting over the past week, after a conscious effort since Allawi took over in late June to sharply reduce the visibility of U.S. forces in Iraq. Cole and others noted that Marines' actions have created serious and potentially fatal strains even within the government. Its Shia vice president, Ibrahim Jaafari, who is also leader of the Dawa Party and generally regarded as Iraq's most popular political figure, on Wednesday denounced the presence of U.S. forces in Najaf, while the deputy governor of Najaf province resigned to protest "all the U.S. terrorist operations that they are doing against this holy city." In addition, the hard-line Sunni Board of Muslim Clergy issued a fatwa that no Muslims should cooperate with U.S. forces in killing other Muslims, in a move that recalled events in April when Shi'ites rallied to support Sunni fighters besieged by U.S. Marines in Fallujah. "What's going on right now looks a lot like April 1991, when it was [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] who was crushing a Shi'ite uprising. But now it's the Marines who are playing the role of the Republican Guard," Cole told IPS, adding that U.S. policy in Iraq was looking increasingly like "Ba'ath-lite," particularly under Allawi. Although a Shi'ite himself, Allawi was a rising star in the Ba'ath Party when he broke with Hussein in the 1970s. Long favored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during his exile in London, he has moved to rehabilitate thousands of former party members who were purged during the initial stages of the U.S.-led occupation. U.S. support for Allawi has clearly stoked fears, particularly among the Shi'ite and Kurdish communities, of a Ba'athist revival, and the past week's offensive against the Mehdi Army has done nothing to lessen them. Reuel Marc Gerecht, an Iraq expert at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has warned repeatedly over the last several months that the administration should do everything it can to avoid attacking Sadr's militia in Najaf, as opposed to its presence in other strongholds in Baghdad and southern Iraq. Shi'ites make up roughly 60 percent of Iraq's population. "If we go into Najaf in force, we will lose Grand Ayatollah [Ali] Sistani," by far the most influential Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, Gerecht, a former CIA operative, warned in May, adding that Sistani was much better able to neutralize al-Sadr on his own. Sistani, who has publicly criticized both Washington and Sadr, left the country for medical treatment in Britain just as the U.S. offensive got underway; his office called for a ceasefire late Thursday night. "The greatest vulnerability we have is to turn the mass of the [Shi'ite] population against the coalition," retired Army Gen. Daniel Christman told USA Today. "We can win every tactical battle but lose the war if we don't put the individual engagements inside a larger political context." But that appears to be precisely what is taking place, according to Cole, who predicted the most likely result of the current fighting will be a "long-term, low-intensity Shi'ite insurgency in the south, similar to what we have seen in the so-called Sunni Triangle." In the last two days, for example, the Mehdi Army has engaged against local police and coalition forces in five southern cities, while large-scale demonstrations were mounted in Sadr City, the sprawling Baghdad slum named for Sadr's father, which remains largely in the militia's control. "People say the south has been quieter [than the Sunni area], but I think that's over now," said Cole. "You can defeat the Mehdi Army militarily; they're just youth gangs with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], but you can't decisively defeat them. They're from neighborhoods that have been settled by clans from the countryside, and for every one of [their members] who are killed, two or three others will join up." But the fighting in Najaf has much broader implications, which spell big trouble for the United States beyond Iraq, according to the experts. "It is vital that Washington understand that it cannot consider the Shi'ites of Iraq to be an independent, national body," warned Youssef Ibrahim, a former New York Times correspondent, in a widely noted column published in June. "Any efforts by the Americans or the new Iraqi government to marginalize or imprison [Sadr] would cause reverberations from Iran to Lebanon to Pakistan." The attack on Najaf, particularly if it ends in Sadr's death or serious damage to the mosque, will make those reverberations particularly severe, according to Cole, who noted that Iran's government is already under pressure from hardliners and the Revolutionary Guard to take stronger action in defense of Sadr. "Lebanese Hezbollah will organize, the U.S. naval base in Bahrain [where there is a large Shi'ite community] is likely to be a target," he said. "I think there will be anti-U.S. terror coming out of this, and the American public will again ask, 'Why do they hate us?'" "It will completely discredit America and make it the new tyrant in the eyes of Shias worldwide," said Al-Qazwini. link
glynch, you've hit rock-bottom. Trying to slip in an article from AntiWar.com, huh? I went to that website, and found that every article bashed the Bush administration and tried to portray America in the worst possible light. Now, I fully understand that there are Americans out there who want America to fail (who I'm sure fully support Mr. Northeast Eliteist Liberal John Kerry), but I feel it is necessary to call out this linked story.
With Glynch you don't really need to read the article to understand what he's saying. People fighting the US are patriots and freedom fighters. The US is bad. We are oppressors and mean mean people. Canada is a cool.
Exactly. We are the evil bullies of the world, intent upon world domination, hegemony, etc. We deserved 9/11 in the eyes of Glynch and other human debris.
if you destroyed the shia shrines do you really think none of the sunnis would be pissed off? you dont think 'anti american regimes' everywhere would at least use it to justify their anti americanness?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is anything like a "sleeping gas". I don't remember exactly where I heard it , something like the history channel, but some expert was saying in all the movies they use 'sleeping bombs' but in truth no one has ever come up with real application of it. You know you never hear of SWAT teams piping in sleeping gas or criminals putting every one in the bank asleep with with gas. You would think after the 90 years of miltary science since WW1 the development and use of sleeping gas would be common knowledge. I guess it's a lot easier to kill people than to put then to sleep.
