Just finish the job already...

5,000 U.S. troops have Al Sadr and the remaining elements of his Mahdi Army's forces constituted in Najaf (among other cities like Fallujah) holed up in a Mosque and a cemestary (if I heard right). And so what do we do? We negotiate for an end when we are in position to capture or kill a major rebel figure in Iraq.

We didn't learn from Fallujah in April, we didn't learn from the deaths of troops there that were essentially wasted when the U.S. pulled out of the city instead of defeating its opponent (which it is more than capable of erradicating). But, the military leadership and political leadership are being "sensative" about this. Yet another hypocritical irony of one of the election campaigns (first the flip flop crap which they are also guilty of, and now blasting "sensitivity" while practicing it them-fucking-selves).

Hello!? When Sadr was left in power after Fallujah he gained more supporters for having stood up to the occupation and won. He may have lost more people but in the end it was the U.S. that retreated. The only difference in Najaf is we know where he is and we have almost all of the city under our control except for that Mosque and the nearby buildings.

See these pro-Sadr rallies going on, with Iraqi police marching with them? That's a danger to the U.S. picked government of Iraq, and we keep letting them gain strength.

Okay, so you can't have Cobras or Apaches lob a spread of hellfire missiles into the mosque (even though the insurgency recently exploded bombs at a number of Christian churches in Baghdad and Mosul), I partially get the insensitivity of doing that, but you sure as hell can storm the place with backup from the machine guns mounted onto Humvees and Bradleys.

It could be over so fast then, and the best case scenario would be that you'd have him alive and able to be put on trial and accountable for whats happened (seeing as how accountability isn't present in the U.S. government gotta apply it somewhere else at least).

And no surprise that the peace talks broke down because each side blames the other for the violence. That outcome was inevitable. Finish it now if there really is a desire to try and attain peace there.

But given how we seem to be purposely botching our own war efforts to let our enemies regroup for more strikes to make the war more potent and paramount as violence then escalates, I'm not counting to much on us finishing off Sadr's Mahdi Army in Najaf.