One Day

Tuesday: the Hussein boys are discovering that their "paradise" isn't so peachy.

Wednesday: Newsweek Monday-morning quarterbacks the fight in Mosul that took out Uday and Qusay.

Thursday: Pictures of two bodies, still identifiable as human, are published, purported to be those of Uday and Qusay. (no link to the pictures as they're a bit macabre, but I found them on Yahoo! - look under our old friends of the disgusting, Reuters.)

Now I know that in the past I've been quick to take exception to something that I've seen as a mistake. But come on, look at this for a minute.

If you take them alive, yeah, you get the PR boost from Nuremberging these two (along with the cries from the human righters that you're flaunting the Geneva Conventions) and maybe they give up some really great intelligence on hidden WMDs or on Daddy Dearest before they melt off into the general inmate population at Leavenworth where they become accomplished artists who make great cultural contributions to the world through their jailhouse artwork.

Or maybe, you arrest them and they become the focal rallying point of every bin Laden wannabe kicking around. Maybe they turn their Nuremberg in a circus more offensive than the OJ trial. Maybe they get some judge that decides to let them off in a fit of moralistic relevancy ("well, murder was accepted in their family, so you can't hold them responsible for their upbringing").

You really can't say that having them alive is any better than having them dead. We don't know (and never will know now) what they might have been able to tell us, or what deception they might have tried to use against us. We said "dead or alive;" they're dead. End of story.

But what about this whole "excessive force" charge? How are we to judge whether or not the force used was excessive? And what gives some reporter, who wasn't there either, any right to judge?

Is it because he talked to an unnamed British intelligence source (who wasn't there) who said so? Or because a former Special Forces guy (wasn't there either!) said a SWAT team should have been able to do this?

Bottom line was that the officers on the scene knew that they needed to take the occupants of the house dead or alive. The occupants decided that they didn't like the alive part, so the officer on the scene obliged them with the dead option.

It's too bad that the little Husseins won't be able to be "exploited." But we have always maintained that we wanted them "dead or alive." We have maintained that pledge.

We did exactly what we said we were going to. Once the decision was cast that death was the operative choice, we should have expected our military to ensure that that decision was implemented without question.

This battle, more than any others in this war so far, was one that we could not afford to lose. To back off when four ordinary Iraqis hole up and start shooting is one thing, but when it's the "boys" compassion and negotiation were not options. Enforcement of our demands with extreme prejudice was required.

If you want to question our men in uniform, I think the only justifiable question is why more firepower wasn't used, because those two looked to be in way too good a shape for having just bitten the big one at the hand of two hundred members of the 101st.

One day for the media to start asking inane questions. Amazing.