thanks for using google to link...

To released prisoner: I'm sorry sir, but we cannot know if the police beat you on your hands until it is verified by the United Nations.

(see previous item)

That's it, man. We're sending the LA cops to Iraq. Payback is a bitch.

Where is Al Jezeera when you need them, oops, that's right, they don't report stories like this...they only report stories that show video of US POWs being interrogated and their own boo hoo reporters died stories.

So, the residents of a hardscrabble, long-brutalized Shiite neighborhood are today "worried that America will see in their gratitude a blank check to remake their country."

Mr. Neama - a day laborer - and who has just been savagly beaten by the regime, has Iraq's long-term future on his mind: "We would not like it if the Americans try to stay here for long."

Not to worry, though, the NYT found Mr. Mahdi, who "stepped forward to declaim that such ambivalence was a copout."

And how did he counter Mr. Neama's ambivilence?

"If Bush just wants to get rid of Saddam, that's fine," continued Mr. Mahdi. "But if he is going to try go alter our basic institutions, like our religion and traditions and culture, then he will have no support." Mr. Mahdi said most Iraqis would welcome Americans in helping set up an Iraqi government that would spread around the country's vast oil wealth. But beyond such help, Mr. Mahdi said, the Iraqis were not interested.

That ought to straighten Mr. Neama out.

The word will get around. Evidentually. Maybe.

"For 75 years I have been alive, and I'll say this," Mr. Mahdi said. "If the Iraqi people loved Saddam Hussein, the American military wouldn't be able to last one day in Iraq. Not one day. We would attack them."

This is from the guy just freed... Maybe he took a couple in the head...

Nothing stops the American army except the American voters... and to that, only near election time...

"Even if the Americans win, for two years, we will be fearing Saddam," he said.

And through-out the article he keeps repeating he doesn't want the Americans to stay...

Well make up your mind, you want to be safe or what?

One morning maybe 10 or 20 years from now Times reporter Dexter Filkins is going to get out of bed and vomit.

Typical NY Times bullshit. Fearing that their article might actual show coalition troops to be liberators, they have to include quotes that show that the Iraqis don't really love Americans, blah, blah, blah. What's missing, of course, is the discussion leading up to that quote (i.e., what was the question posed by that "objective" reporter?). Meanwhile, they correctly capitalize "Marine" in a couple of places, but in a not-so-subtle "slip" leave it uncapitalized in other places? Poor editing or passive aggression? Who cares . . . it's the New York Times. Waste of good trees.

High&Hot,

I doubt it. New York is absolutely full of intellectual contortionists like him. Apparently even the sight of the WTC coming down in front of our very eyes, of the hospitals and emergency rooms of September 11, wasn't enough to make people like that wake up and take notice.

Orig. Mike:

"Even if the Americans win, for two years, we will be fearing Saddam," he said.

I thought this was a very apt quote actually. I have intimate and personal experience with regime change (Romania 1989) and the previous police state had all kinds of ways of rising from the dead to haunt people (no vampire jokes please).

Lou,
How long did it take before the state police, etc. were finally not a factor?

Also, if you can spare the time, can you please explain what it took to get rid of them? And did they flee the country? Trials? Thanks in advance for sharing what you know.

We just invaded the country. Wariness about U.S. motives seems reasonable, and we've got to prove ourselves.

If the U.S. suffered through a dictatorship and we were invaded by, say, Russia, don't you think we'd immediately be saying to the Russians, "Hey, thanks! We can take it from here!"

And if the Russians were putting out press releases about military government for two years, don't you think we'd start scrounging for ammunition?

I don't doubt that suspicion of the U.S. and a desire to see us get out ASAP goes hand in hand with gratitude for the liberation. In their shoes, it's only what we would feel.

Hey Low... I'm Original Mark...

:)