I take no pleasure in saying that, by this time next week, it will be as if it had never occurred.

As I have asked elsewhere, don't you think he looks great after tangling with a half-ton of high explosive and cinder blocks?

Well said, sir.

 Lost in all that is the fact that we were essentially protecting Zarqawi in the no fly zone and refused to take him out before the war. Just another silly little mistake costing hundreds if not thousands of lives. No problem, eh?

 Steve

I'm sure there are those who will trumpet this as the turning of a definitive corner. There's always hope, I suppose, but I'm afraid this means very little in terms of stabilizing the situation over there.

How many of OBL's #2's have been taken out to date?

____________________________

We'll even the score in WW IV

Fox News' Sheppard Smith a few minutes ago remarked that Zarqawi was the man responsible for more deaths in Iraq than anyone else. Somehow, there seems to be something disturbingly wrong with that statement.

This administration has enjoyed many benefits for its agenda through Zarquawi's continued existence. If ever there was a justification to kill someone outright, he was it. The Bush administration is unique in history with its pre-emption doctrine, but it failed to exercise the position it had so vociferously articulated in Zarqawi's case until Bush's approval ratings reached their nadir.

They could have blown this guy into a cloud of red mist any time they wanted. So many opportunities to get him have passed them by. Why did they wait until now?

Good riddance to bad rubbish, but rubbish ain't the only thing that stinks here.

What a sour reaction to an event that has to count as an accomplishment under the lowered expectations of the Bush era.

I am puzzled as to why no apparent effort was made to capture him. Any ideas?

Please forgive me for beating on this, but I just took a look at the photo of the bombed-out house posted by Michelle Malkin. The destruction is so extensive that I just can't fathom a body coming through that intact to the extent that Zarqawi's did.

We have also been told that the site was a "treasure trove" of evidence, yet there doesn't appear to me to be any significant excavation and clearing of the rubble. It seems to me that it would have been all but sifted. Also, it is notable to me that civilians, particularly children, are allowed within a short time to stroll casually around the scene, which is now purported to have been a farmhouse in an isolated area forty miles north of Baghdad.

Finally, it struck me that the before-cleanup photo of Zarqawi looks suspiciously like that of an individual wounded by shotgun pellets (striking from his left side) rather than one who was subjected to a half-ton of high explosive ordinance.

My reaction is sour because with each "accomplishment" we get an attempt to zero out the debit side of the ledger. Zarqawi's corpse does not even begin to balance the unthinkable amounts of blood and treasure spent on this fiasco, the Pentagon's cheap Eau De Toilette notwithstanding.

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/steve_bell/2006/06/09/bell512.jpg

With the recent outcry about developing on-the-ground human intelligence sources in Iraq and the claims that we have made great strides in doing so, why on earth would the top Al Quaeda guy in Iraq and a bonus of a half-dozen of his coterie, who were in an isolated rural farmhouse, surrounded by troops, simply be smoked?

Today, Rush Limbaugh added his two cents to such wisdom by remarking that it would have been only appropriate that our guys would not be in a hurry to get medical attention to the presumed still-alive Zarqawi. Earlier this morning, former ambassador Marc Ginsberg expressed the wish that our people would have taken advantage of his still being alive by torturing him in his last moments.