Indepedent UK Shock Claim: US Had Contingency Plan To Kil Sadr (Three Years Ago, If You Bother Reading Past The First Page, Which They Hope You Won't)

It's bias, it's written for maximum shock value, it's intended to rile up anti-American Europussies. And yet still I find Allah's angry tone here a bit off.

Of course we had a plan to kil Sadr. Of course we still have "plans," in the sense of "blueprints for" rather than actual present intentions, to kill him, should it become necessary.

The tone and intent of the piece can be criticized, but not really the basic accuracy of it all.

Do we have "plans" to whack Sadr should it become necessary? Well, if we don't, that's a dereliction of national security planning that rises to the firing/impeachable level.

I guess Allah's problem with the piece (as is mine) is that this common-sense news-that's-only-news-to-the-intellectually-incurious should be written with an of course, SFW? kind of tone, not this off-the-rails attempt to propagandize further on behalf of Sadr, Iran, the hard-core Sunni "insurgents," and Al Qaeda itself.

I've got news for Patrick Cockburn: Not only do we have plans to kill Sadr, we have "plans," in the sense of pure how-would-it-be-done plans, not intentions, to assassinate the PM of Britain and even the friggin' Royal Family too, should they become big problems.

You know the guys in the basement of the Pentagon in the Plans Department? See, this is what they do all day: They draw up plans. Plans for seizing Saudi Arabi's oil, plans for a full-on first-strike thermonuclear attack on Russia. Plans on how to sell out Israel to the Arabs and convince the American people they had it coming, should it be necessary to cut such an odious deal with Al Qaeda.

Plans for everything, from the unlikely to the fantastical to even the quite possible.

That's kind of what we're paying them to do.

Meanwhile, Anbar is so quiet now that even Michael Yon can't paint it as exciting.

That's boring.

posted by Ace at 10:50 PM

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