The Wild, Wild East

"Whenever there is a new al-Zarqawi, we will kill him." – Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
It’s good to know that President Pinhead’s Wild West rhetoric can be so successfully implanted in the Middle East even if Democracy seems to be having a hard time getting a foothold.
So, they finally got their man. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death comes at a time when folks here in the United States would just as soon have their soldiers guarding their own borders rather than dodging shrapnel on the other side of the planet. Fifty-nine percent of adults say the United States made a mistake in going to war in Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. The Oliver Stone in me imagines that Coalition Forces may have had al-Zarqawi’s body on ice for just such an emergency.
Four other people, including a woman and a child, were killed when F-16 fighter jets dropped two 500-pound bombs, obliterating the terrorist leader's safe house five miles west of Baqouba. Fingerprints, tattoos and scars helped U.S. troops identify al-Zarqawi's body. The fact that there were fingerprints left is significant in itself, and then the exhibit of the photos of his face with his eyes closed and spots of blood - images reminiscent of photos of Saddam's dead sons – and those images were reminiscent of the tintypes of dead outlaws. My mind wanders from that to a scene from "The Outlaw Josey Wales": Josey rides out to meet the chief of the Comanche tribe that is threatening the homesteaders’ farm.
Ten Bears: These things you say we will have, we already have.
Josey Wales: That's true. I ain't promising you nothing extra. I'm just giving you life and you're giving me life. And I'm saying that men can live together without butchering one another. Ten Bears: It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... or death. It shall be life.
Here's hoping that's how things shake out after the next meeting of the burgeoning Iraqi government. Sleep Tight, America.