The Wild, Wild, East

(BooMan, wow… great site! Sort of an alternate Kosiverse… I apologize in advance for crossposting this from DKos, but it was a quick way for me to feel out the BooMan Trib. I posted this on DKos last night, and it was up for maybe 10 minutes before it was “Schiavoed” off the list…)

Damn, maybe Dub has succeeded in bringing Justice to Iraq… Frontier Justice! And wouldn’t you know that NYT and AP are all over it like it’s good news.

NYT : “Ordinary Iraqis Wage a Successful Battle Against Insurgents”

AP : “Baghdad Shopkeepers Kill Three Militants”

Don’t get me wrong, were I in the shopkeepers place, I’d like to hope that I would have been able to save my own family and business as well… but isn’t that the responsibility of the occupying force?

“We attacked them before they attacked us,” Dhia, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, said in a brief exchange at his shop a few hours after the battle. He did not give his last name. “We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen. I am waiting for the rest of them to come and we will show them.”

After a heated gun battle that left three insurgents dead and two nephews and a bystander wounded, the remainder of the insurgents fled after the police showed up. Links are here: NYT and AP .

Quotes from Capitol Hill after the fold…

Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California who strongly opposed the war, said al-Jaafari didn’t seem as “upbeat as our people, who seem to be very excited about the quality of the Iraqi police force.My sense was he was certainly in no rush to hand over security to his new police force,” she said.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., agreed, saying that “it’s too early to declare success.” But Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., expressed “quiet optimism” about Iraq’s future.

Yup, Baghdad, they’s a new shurriff in town and he’s… well… yur it!

Mark my words, this shopkeeper will be shaking hands on TV with some Bush Administration official before the week is out! Frontier Justice and Freedom, American style, has arrived…