Wednesday, July 23, 2003

I’m watching the rerun of the Centcom briefing from this morning on C-SPAN right now. I didn’t catch who and where one reporter was from but he asked a convoluted question about why our guys didn’t just wait out the Hussein Bros. & Co. at that villa like in a hostage situation. After all, they only had AK-47s against the much more powerful arms the US forces had, yadda yadda yadda…

C-SPAN just cut off the General’s answer to go to live coverage of the House. But I’ll be happy to answer it.

1.  Did you not listen to what the General just rattled off for you? He was pretty explicit in the events that lead to the shootout.

2.  While our military call those AK-47s “small arms,” they’re still pretty powerful weapons. Gun people with better knowledge can correct me, if I’m wrong. Plus the house they were in was heavily fortified.

3.  Our guys tried to talk to them first, using a bullhorn and knocking on the frigging door. In the first attempt at knocking and entering, four of our guys were injured when shot at. This bullhorn & knocking thing was tried two more times, with no success.

4.  The Hussein Bros. & Co. shot at our guys first. In the Rules of Engagement, that means our guys have the right to fire back.

5.  The whole thing took four hours, even after our guys unloaded a pretty substantial artillery into the house.

6.  After the three adults were killed, the kid was still shooting as our guys went into the house.

Those guys went down as the evil, war-mongering, ruthless, sons of ******* they were. Do I wish we could have taken them alive? Sure...it would be easier to convince the Iraqi people we had them if they were alive, I think. They could have led us to Daddy. Their trials would have given the Iraqi people the justice they deserve for the atrocities these men perpetrated on the people. I would have preferred to see them swinging from the neck in the square where that famous Saddam statue was taken down, after having been convicted by a war crimes tribunal. But the end result is the same, death - it just came sooner than we may have hoped for.

UPDATE: Sgt. Hook has some thoughts on this.