"Fester" <not@home.com> wrote in message
news:468ebe43$0$24745$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...

http://michaelyon-online.com/wp/baqubah-update-05-july-2007.htm

<quote>
The big news on the streets today is that the people of Baqubah are
generally ecstatic, although many hold in reserve a serious concern that
we will abandon them again. For many Iraqis, we have morphed from being
invaders to occupiers to members of a tribe. I call it the "al Ameriki
tribe," or "tribe America."

I've seen this kind of progression in Mosul, out in Anbar and other
places, and when I ask our military leaders if they have sensed any
shift, many have said, yes, they too sense that Iraqis view us
differently. In the context of sectarian and tribal strife, we are the
tribe that people can-more or less and with giant caveats-rely on.

...

At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al
Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought
differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in
Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to
their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said,
who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man's
words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a
moment. I asked Wallach, "What did he say?" Wallach said that at these
luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was
brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda
served the boy to his family.

You missed out the two most pathetically would-be manipulative paragraphs
:

-----
Most Iraqis I talk with acknowledge that if it was ever about the oil,
it's not now. Not mostly anyway. It clearly would have been cheaper just
to buy the oil or invade somewhere easier that has more. Similarly, most
Iraqis seem now to realize that we really don't want to stay here, and
that many of us can't wait to get back home. They realize that we are not
resolved to stay, but are impatient to drive down to Kuwait and sail away.
And when they consider the Americans who actually deal with Iraqis every
day, the Iraqis can no longer deny that we really do want them to succeed.
But we want them to succeed without us. We want to see their streets are
clean and safe, their grass is green, and their birds are singing. We want
to see that on television. Not in person. We don't want to be here. We
tell them that every day. It finally has settled in that we are telling
the truth.
-----
Like many things in Iraq, the question of whether or not the murderers
were al Qaeda is flawed from beginning. Al Qaeda is not a union, it
doesn't issue passports. What is al Qaeda but the collection of people who
claim to be al Qaeda? Those responsible for murdering and burying those
bodies in al Ahamir (or al Hamira) had the markers of al Qaeda, the same
al Qaeda that had boastfully installed itself as the shadow government of
Baqubah. The al Qaeda who committed atrocities in Afghanistan, New York .
. . the list is long. As for al Ahamir, the massacre "walks like a duck."
It happened in duck headquarters. The people here say the duck did it. The
duck laughs.
-----

If any sane person has a question about just what makes the above so
desperately ludicrous, I will explain. Maybe.