Convoy Whack-A-Mole
So the Pentagon is pinning its anti-Saddam hopes on yet more DNA testing of the organic residue from its Mob-style hit on a bunch of SUVs in Iraq last week.
Officials said they had picked up no indications since the attack that the former Iraqi president or his sons, Uday and Qusay, had been in the group of vehicles that was leaving Iraq for Syria. “You can’t totally rule it out, but there’s nothing to indicate it,” one official said … Residents of the Iraqi village of Dhib, about 70 miles south of the border town of Qaim, said yesterday that two villagers were killed, including a 1-year-old girl, and three others wounded when a U.S. missile struck their house during the attack.
The Bush Gang is obviously eager to assassinate Hussein outright to avoid the inconvenience of a capture with a possible trial, where he might be tempted to spill the beans on US-Iraqi cooperation during the 1980s and 1990s. Their basic strategy seems to be to attack all groups of large vehicles in western Iraq, whack-a-mole-style, in the hope that maybe one of them will contain Hussein. Good news for trigger-happy unmanned drone joystick jockeys, bad news for Iraqi taxicab drivers straying off the beaten path. The Pentagon even managed to attack a Syrian military convoy, but the Syrian government is so anxious to avoid confrontation that they basically blamed themselves. After wounding several Syrians, the US forces kidnapped the Syrians and held them prisoner, despite Syrian protests.
I am reminded of the increasingly desperate rain-of-death-from-the-sky approach used in Afghanistan in the attempt to “rub out” Mullah Omar and Bin Laden, when the Pentagon ended up attacking and killing a bunch of travelling scrap metal dealers because one of them was tall and looked a little like Bin Laden when viewed from several miles away. So for tall people in Afghanistan, and SUV drivers in Iraq, is this a kind of state-sponsored terrorism? I think so. It would certainly terrify me.
Earlier here.