MULLAH OMAR! I shall have to hunt that one down!

salam

Reassure me, please: jihad means "defend from invaders", not "go on the offensive", right? This isn't a call to attack other countries?

MSNBC reporting that 7 POW's found dead at the hospital where Jessica Lynch had been found. Where they keeping dead bodies at the hospital and they just hadn't gotten around to executing her yet? Or did something unsightly happen which is why they have taken so long to inform us? Probably not but still got me wondering.

I'm not sure that those of use who speak western languages can understand the nuances of easter languages without a lot of education, but my understanding is that "Jihad" broadly means "struggle." It can be a struggle against a military foe, or a struggle with oneself. Jihad is not inherently violent, though when spoken of by lunatics like Omar, violience is very much the point.

One very excited Bob Arnot (MSNBC) is now reporting the Marines have crossed the Tigris - and that the Battle for Baghdad has indeed "begun."

Dr Bob Arnot on MSNBC reporting that the Tigris has been bridged. Says attack on Baghdad imminent.

Ollie North on Fox also just reported Marines crossed the Tigris SE of Baghdad.

Also, MSNBC is reported on how they found the American POW:

Evidently, an Iraqi citizen passed a note to Army or Marine personel saying that there were American POW's at the hospital in Nazariah, and that they were being tortured. I would definitely treat this as suspect...

Sorry - I guess "imminent" is the word they are using on MSNBC. The use of "begun" was my own. Sorry - I'll try harder to keep opinion out of this!

No worry BWH I believe we both posted simultaneously. I did not know of your post when I posted mine.

I just saw the same TV reports noted above - Arnot on the Marines crossing the Tigris, and the Iraqi passing a note saying that PFC Lynch was being held and tortured, which led to her rescue.

Great news! Allah u Akbar!

It appears our fearless leader has fallen asleep at the wheel! Paging Sean Paul!

CNN is going to address 'blogging'. Up next

That hospital at Nassiriya where Jennifer Lynch was found -- is it the same hospital that was captured three or four days ago?

Or a different one?

Uh, sorry-- "Jihad" most definitely means violent aggression, in particular to take land from the infidel. Talk of "internal struggle to better oneself" is ridiculous white-washing. Along the lines of "Islam means 'peace'." -- in fact it translates as "submission".

Stop drinking the multi-culti kool-aid.

S-P

Blogging on CNN right now.

being a knee-jerk right-winger is one thing, but please keep your facts straight. 'islam' means submission to god, and derives its etymology from the word for peace, so if you are stupid enough to make an argument out of what a word means, it means something with which few would disagree.

I would, but that's because I am a good old-fashioned atheist.

Uh, Dan,

Re: the hospital. They required special forces to recover her, so it's pretty safe to assume she wasn't merely lost in some unexplored wing of an already captured hospital. The town is around 500K in population right? One assumes they have more than one hospital.

Of course, it could all be a great big Zionist-CENTCOM propaganda ploy...[smirk]

Looks like this weekend may be the last opportunity for International Answer kiddies to play in traffic-- at the rate the advance is going, it'll be done sometime next week.

below is a link to a small article with some questioning about what's really going on in western iraq. We all know about the special forces, capturing of airfields, a couple of small skirmishes.

Some of us out here have been harboring thoughts (some of us hopes) that alot more is brewing there than is being made known. Notice there are no embeds out there (could be for many practical reasons.. or not). And that there was a brief flurry of reports last week about a surge in activity in Jordan, along with some mention of an off-limits zone in Jordan (created to ward off prying eyes or locals who might not be too happy about what they might see out there?), and some speculative reports that more is happening there than is meets the eye.

At any rate:

http://www.jordantimes.com/Mon/news/news7.htm

Anyone care to speculate on what might be out there, other than the admitted special forces and perhaps some forward deployment of some A10's and choppers out of Kuwait/Saudi?

lb

http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/0,12823,883261,00.html

Ooooh, this is an interesting site, as is this

http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1850208

also

www.takebackthemedia.com

warning - left wing bias in the last one and maybe in the first one. Fairly objective in the middle.

Once you sort through the political bias and get to the actual data, you will find a long list of stories already bungled, retracted, or "disappeared"....the media is not doing a very good job.

didn't hear anything else about that story with the state department being evacuated due to SARS... has anyone else? it was AFP but as a banner.

Steve -

No, that's only partially correct. A strict interpretation of the word "jihad" indeed means "struggle." Many, in fact one could speculate, most, Islamic experts in fact interpret Mohammed's statements on jihad in a way that ranks the struggle with one's self to be righteous (following the five pillars of Islam and leading a good Muslim life) as a more important facet of religion than the struggle against the world of undbelievers. Fundamentalists are usually the only ones who translate jihad as "holy war."

steve,

sorry, but sneering and preening don't go over real well.

I was simply asking a question.

'kay?

Go to the ABB if you want to play funny funny ha ha.

Better yet, suit up, join up, load up, and pound the sand, braveheart.

Oops -
fundamentalists and journalists...

CNN & CNN & Arron Brown just had a segment on Blogs and Blogers. It was a rather insipid piece.

April Fools?
I hope this is –because if it isn’t it’s very sad!
Has Stratfor contacted you? You would could have prevented a lot of grief if you would have answered this in your initial post. Yes or no? This would have made a big difference. Did you call them (Stratfor) before posting (1-800-286-9026)?
If you are copying and pasting their stuff, then take the time to note that. Via Stratfor doesn’t take that long to type in!
Why did you delete General Roy’s post? He followed your posting rules. Seems to me you fell for his bait–hook, line and sinker. You sent your readers to his site. When I first went to the site there were 0 post in the “permission to speak freely”. Now there are many. Most of them are Jay. Is this your Jay? Because if it is, he didn’t follow your posting rules.
And what’s up with “various nefarious elements” --one guy, is this your axis of evil?
I was suspicious when you said you have “no opinion of the war” –that’s very different to admitting you won’t allow your opinions to bias your postings. Fifteen years from now when your son ask you what you thought about the war will you, in good conscious, be able to tell him “I had no opinion about the war”?
So, check your ego at the laptop, take your helmet off your head and sit on it to protect your balls because if this isn’t an April Fools joke your being squeezed.

wcw,

When you say Islam means "submission to god", don't you understand that it doesn't mean just any old god? It means to their god, as interpreted by them. Which is the whole problem, especially when combined with Jihad.

Who cares about the derivation of the word if it has a meaning distinct from its roots?

Where are all the moderate muslims speaking out against islamic extremism?

Probably scared they'll be killed by their more radical cousins if they speak out, I suppose.

Oh, and if Jihad means what SOME people say it means, and if islam means what those same people claim it means...then the western world is toast.

There are a billion muslims, and several large high tech nations that would love to use that billion-strong population as shock troops.

Fact is, that the 1% minority of radical freaks who pollute the Muslim message are pretty much despised by the muslims I know and work with, and by the majority of the people I met while traveling in muslim nations.

Of course, all that is about to change for the worse.

i read in one of those russian intel reports that the americans are using israel for aircraft and the usa has tomahawk(sp?) missiles in jordan.

also, afp just reported that the russians just launched a military satellite. this is getting to be interesting between the usa and russia.

sj, in your post aboth possible dead bodies at the hospital:

If additional POW's were found dead at the hospital, no doubt the military wants to notify family before anything leaks out via the press. Also, they may be analyzing the way the soldiers died to see if they were dead because of battle wounds or were executed after capture.

Hopefully, this is just another incorrect story, like so many in the press, but if not, we may get more confirmation of the brutality of war by a country that does not even attempt to abide by the Geneva Conventions, even though it said it would.

if Ollie's on the other side of the Tigris, do an inventory check on Stingers and make sure he doesn't head too far east

BHW,

One could speculate that most Islamic experts like to explain one thing in public to western media while holding private meetings after hours during which they exhort their audience to engage in 'jihad', by which they most certainly don't mean self-improvement. On the other hand, assuming the 5 pillars of righteousness include things like taking land from the unbeliever, beating ones wives, etc., they could be technically correct in their public statements.

Rushdie wrote a nice editorial on the subject of moderate muslims a while back (months? a year or two?).

as for your implication, have you got some well-administered surveys of muslim populations? after all, uninformed observers of the US might currently get the idea that the aggregate populace was for this war without doing a little thinking and analysis.

north korea delivered scuds to pakistan in exchange for nuclear weapons technology. afp

tony,I was merely wondering about the possibility of the POW's succumbing to the rescue operation itself. It would not have beent the first time that has happened.

Dan,

One billion shock troops! Eeek! Thank goodness for neutron bombs. Easier on the infrastructure.

Seriously, so you're arguing that we should NOT go after extremist psychopaths, because doing so turns ordinary muslims into islamic wackos? There's a schoolyard lesson about handling bullies that you've forgotten.

Steve -

I am a bit disappointed that anyone would characterize an entire religion, expecially one including more than a billion followers, by acts committed by extremists or those using Islam as merely a cover for political agendas.

In fact, it is an interesting corollary that the Crusades still play a major role in politicizing Arab debate and galvanizing anti-Western opinion.

at the rate the advance is going, it'll be done sometime next week.

The Red Army used an army of 2.5 million to take a city of half that size in 2 months, and suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties doing so. That was against an enemy which had ceased to exist except on paper.

Where can I find some of the cheap drugs being smoked by those who think a force of 150 thousand is going to take a city of 5 million in under a week? Next you'll ask us to believe they'll suffer fewer than a dozen dead, and those mostly in accidents or as a result of friendly fire.

"TALIBAN militants face exit deadline"

Gulf Daily News 4/2/03 KANDAHAR, Afghanistan:

http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Articles.asp?Article=48216&Sn=WORL

Well let's think--Shiites hate them, Sunnis think too hot to handle--probably not even Khadafi--yes, you got it, Northwest Province of Pakistan. There's always asylum in London, though.

steve,

I am certainly not arguing that we shouldn't go after the extremists.

We should.

How is the million dollar question.

The "bully on the schoolyard" well, let's see - beating the bully at his own game, surprising the bully, and standing up to the bully are very very different from firebombing his house, strafing his neighborhood, killing a bunch of his relatives, and poisoning his pets.

See?

As I see it the rounding up of fanatics and scum was working pretty well, had the cooperation and support of a bunch of states like syria and iran...not to mention that Hussein himself has been pretty consistently hostile to those same radical fanatics.

See?

To break my own protocol and add commentary here:

I am not the 'Jay' from General Roy's message board, and I'm about to go set the record straight there. I did delete his post on this board because it violated the "personal attack" rule -- though to be fair it was in response to Sean-Paul's post here .. but that was in response to a strangely motivated attack on Sean-Pauls credibility .. it's hard to draw the line.

Posts on agonist.org are starting to flow in the right direction; more news is showing up on this page and more discussion is happening on the bulletin board. We're going to police things as little as possible, which is easier than expected because nearly everyone is being civil. Thanks guys!

Thank goodness for neutron bombs.

Troll alert!

raven,

You might recall much hand-wringing before the Afghanistan campaign about how the mighty Soviet Red Army had failed miserably, thus we were doomed to failure as well? The funny thing is, it's the same morons carping this time, without so much as an apology or explanation of their previous mistakes.

raven,

why is suggesting one billion muslim shock troops will attack us not worthy of a "troll alert", while suggesting a neutron-bomb defense is?

As far as Dan's follow-up-- I love the notion that Saddam's regime was actively working against terrorism, rather than supporting it. Wow. Now *that* takes some serious drugs to seriously put forward.

night-night.

I am not the 'Jay' from General Roy's message board, and I'm about to go set the record straight there. I did delete his post on this board because it violated the "personal attack" rule -- though to be fair it was in response to Sean-Paul's post here .. but that was in response to a strangely motivated attack on Sean-Pauls credibility .. it's hard to draw the line.

How did it violate the "personal attack" rule?

two strikes, steve -- one more and I ignore you.

the US has accomplished exactly what the Soviets did in '79: they took Kabul. waa-freakin'-hoo. have you noticed all the recent guerilla attacks? this would be the post-'79 analogy. get back to us in a decade or so.

Which Jay are you?

steve,

antagonizing an entire religion by insulting and name calling on international news, by attacking countries, massacring civilians, and destroying cities tends to create angry permanent enemies in large numbers.

And tell me...which terrorist connections to Saddam have been proven, uncovered, or found that we haven't hear about?

Do you have a news story we haven't seen yet?

Where's those WMD?

We're waiting.

Oh, and can you name a prominent muslim extremist that recently got offed in Iraq by the Iraqi authorities?

I certainly can.

And if you think Afghanistan has been "controlled", you aren't paying much attention to much at all.

I wonder if that "night-night" was just a smokescreen.

Why suggestion a neutron bomb defence warrants a troll alert is self-evident.

As for Afghanistan, those who are aware of world events will know that the Taliban haven't been defeated, they simply did not fight the American forces the way the mujahadeen fought the Soviets. Rather, they simply melted into the mountains, or into Pakistan.

Anyway, Kabul ain't no Baghdad.

Advocate, he's SP's tame geek.

raven
are you addresing me?

Good work at countering one of those (I am guessing) americans we are so proud of. There went an example of why we are "so well liked" by the rest of the world. The epitomy of arrogance and ignorance all in one package.

"i read in one of those russian intel reports that the americans are using israel for aircraft and the usa has tomahawk(sp?) missiles in jordan.

tomahawks are ship and submarine launched missiles. I don't believe that there is any provision for land launching

raven, taht was rude