Wolfowitz's hotel hit with rockets in Baghdad

[BoondockSaint]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Anti-American guerrillas attacked the Baghdad hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday with a barrage of rockets, but the No. 2 Pentagon official survived the blasts unharmed, U.S. officials said.

"We have unconfirmed reports of 15 wounded," said a military official. There are no reports of deaths. At least two wounded people were carried out of the hotel on stretchers, said a Reuters journalist at the Rashid Hotel, where the attack occurred at about 6 a.m. local time (11 p.m. EDT Saturday).

Wolfowitz was unharmed and led away by security forces, according to a U.S. defense official at the scene. Witnesses said Wolfowitz, a major force behind the Iraq war, looked composed.

Wolfowitz and senior aides were staying on the 12th floor when the rockets slammed into the hotel several floors below.

Members of his party, who had been dressing ahead of a breakfast meeting on electricity, calmly descended a stairwell past thickening smoke and blood stains. About 200 people, including his party, journalists and U.S. civilian contractors, gathered in the lobby before exiting the building.

"Based on what we have heard in security briefings it may have been that someone set these things up last night and then detonated them remotely," a senior defense official told reporters at the scene.

The official, who saw the rockets slam into the hotel from his room window, predicted there would probably be no more attacks on the party.

"That will have been the event for the day," he said.

A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Sgt. Danny Martin, said six to eight rockets hit the Rashid Hotel on the west side of the building.

Wolfowitz was paying his second visit to Iraq in three months and had stressed the need to speed up the formation of a new Iraqi army, police force, border guard and civil defense corps.

It was not clear if the attack would prompt Wolfowitz to cut short his trip. He was due to leave Iraq for Washington late Sunday night.

The Rashid hotel is part of a compound on the west bank of the Tigris river used by the U.S.-led administration.

It is in a fortified complex that includes palaces built by former leader Saddam Hussein and his elite troops.

Three rockets fired at the hotel by guerrillas on Sept. 27 hit the building but no one was wounded.

[HBox]

I will punch the first person who makes some smartass comment about Wolfowitz.

http://members.aol.com/joepersico/myhomepage/sig1.jpg?mtbrand=AOL_US

[TheMojoPin]

"That will have been the event for the day," he said.

Man, that depresses me.

Thankfully, nobody was killed. That's the least we should hope for these days...

<img src="http://members.hostedscripts.com/randomimage.cgi?user=TheMojoPin">
2% << December boys got it BAD >> "You might tell some lies about the good times we've had/But I've kissed your mother twice...and now I'm working on your dad..."

[monsterone]

I will punch the first person who makes some smartass comment about Wolfowitz.


someone pleae do it. i would love to see how it could happen.

<center><IMG SRC="http://scripts.cgispy.com/image.cgi?u=monsterone01"></center>

<center>son of thunder</center>

[HBox]

I have magic powers, and if someone is ridiculous enough to wish that he died, I'll use them.

http://members.aol.com/joepersico/myhomepage/sig1.jpg?mtbrand=AOL_US

[monsterone]

I will punch the first person who makes some smartass comment about Wolfowitz.






someone pleae do it. i would love to see how it could happen.


<center><IMG SRC="http://scripts.cgispy.com/image.cgi?u=monsterone01"></center>

<center>son of thunder</center>

[monsterone]

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/harry-potter.jpg

<center><IMG SRC="http://scripts.cgispy.com/image.cgi?u=monsterone01"></center>

<center>son of thunder</center>

[BoondockSaint]

I'm not sure what side of the fence you are on.

[Mike Teacher]

Ok What if Wolf Blitzer married Mr. Wolfowitz in some bizarre marriage, and Mr. Blitzer decides to take on his partner's last name.

I give You...

Mr. WOLF WOLFOWITZ

<IMG SRC="http://members.aol.com/miketeachr/sig3">

[Mike Teacher]

Oh yeah, when they have their first baby [dont ask] they, of course, like most, pay homage to someone they admire, in this case of course, Mozart.

So the Boys full name would be:

Wolf Wolfgang Wolfowitz

<IMG SRC="http://members.aol.com/miketeachr/sig3">

[GaryWyze]

[color=purple]And if somebody gave the baby some wool pajamas, you'd have a Wolf in sheep's clothing.

<center>http://czm.racknine.net/images/krustysig.jpg

Much thanks to CZM for the killer, yet not currently working, sig pic

[high fly]

I bet Wolfowitz is glad the war is over.



" and they ask me why I drink"

[Recyclerz]

Baghdad Goes BOOM! (http://www.msnbc.com/news/870749.asp?0cv=CA01)

It may be my overactive imagination, but I am convinced that the people running the resistance against us in Iraq are savvy enough to have read the same books about the TET Offensive in Vietnam that I did.

Let's put it this way: If W's plan all along was to split Iraq into an oil rich Kurdistan in the North, an oil rich Shi'a country in the south and a small area for the Sunnis in the middle that everybody can take turns invading, then everything is going swimmingly. If that wasn't the plan then, ... uh oh.




There ain't no asylum here.
King Solomon, he never lived 'round here.

[Se7en]

The comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are STILL not accurately analogous, no matter how much you wish them to be so.

<center><img border="0" src="http://se7enrfnet.homestead.com/files/KyoSe7en.jpg" width="300" height="125">
<br>
<br>
Resistance is <b>FLAMMABLE.</b></center>

[high fly]

Se7en, had you been around then, you'd see that while sure, there are differences, the similarities are quite depressing, such as seeing our wonderful military being run into the ground by overdeployments, seeing them killed, wounded and maimed day after day with no end in sight, in spite of the 'light at the end of the tunnel' rhetoric coming from the White House that no one believes,
plus the fact that they posed no threat to us.
Another parallel is that it was begun on a lie, then there's the fact that it's shattering the morale of the troops, and then there's the fact that really fine troops aren't reenlisting after being lied to on how long they'd be deployed....

Still, I think the comparison I made before the war to us getting a "California-Sized West Bank for our very own " was pretty accurate.

" and they ask me why I drink"

[TheMojoPin]

It may be my overactive imagination, but I am convinced that the people running the resistance against us in Iraq are savvy enough to have read the same books about the TET Offensive in Vietnam that I did.

THIS punk taught the world a little too well...

http://www.genealogy.ie/images/jpg/col5.jpg

<img src="http://members.hostedscripts.com/randomimage.cgi?user=TheMojoPin">
2% << December boys got it BAD >> "You might tell some lies about the good times we've had/But I've kissed your mother twice...and now I'm working on your dad..."

[monsterone]

had you been around then, you'd see that while sure, there are differences



you do have a point, but comparing less than a year vs. how many years? you sound like a vet, and i mean no disrespect, but let's not cash in the chips so quick.

<center><IMG SRC="http://scripts.cgispy.com/image.cgi?u=monsterone01"></center>

<center>son of thunder</center>

[Yerdaddy]

The thing that's damaging about this is that the "resistance," or however you want to define them, learned to go after soft targets beginning with the UN headquarters in September, followed by the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Najaf that killed over 100 including the most powerful cleric sympathetic to the occupation. Now they've stepped up attacks on soft targets, but they've shown that they can still hit hard targets like the al-Rashid, with a high-profile leader like Wolfowitz inside. That surprises me, and is not a good sign for this whole operation. We've made Iraq a magnet for terrorists that can join up with the remnants of Saddam's regime and do serious damage to a high-profile American operation. If terrorists were a finite group and you could bring them to you and pick them off one at a time until they're all dead, then that might not be a bad strategy. But terrorists multiply, and they won't stop coming and they won't stop operating elsewhere. Every successful attack is a political victory for them that they can use to recruit from the disenchanted and the refugee camps and manipulate funders who can use the defeat of America for their own political purposes. This is the recruiting poster that we were warned about.

The only way to succeed that I can see is to internationalize the reconstruction process. As long as this thing is seen as primarily American, all of those soft targets in Iraq are magnified in propaganda value. Even after we leave, if the new Iraq is seen as American-made then every terrorist in the world will see it as the ultimate prize to knock it down. That will guarantee failure. But if the UN is brought in and the mandate to rebuild Iraq is sanctioned by substantive input of every country, and by a Security Council vote that includes Syria's, and foreign troops are getting killed alongside ours, then the value of Iraq as a terrorist target is diminished, and Iraq stands a chance. The Bush administration doesn't want to do that. Whatever it is he wants to do in Iraq he doesn't even want to tell the Congress about. I'm increasingly afraid he's guaranteeing failure in the long run.

<img src="http://scripts.cgispy.com/image.cgi?u=bonedaddy5">
TEAR THE BITCH APART!

[high fly]

YERDADDY- good analysis, typically well informed.
The bastards have been trying different tactics, not just to shake it up, but it's also them figuring out ways to kill our people.

I am reminded of something that happened regularly back during Vietnam. Them Congs would sit way back and lob rockets or mortar rounds into our big bases. Often they would hit nothing, but occasionally they would hit an ammo dump or fuel storage area.
There on the evening news would be this bigass cloud of black smoke that made it look much worse than it was.
Even when it would be explained that we still had plenty of whatever got destroyed or damaged, when it happened day in and day out, it had a certain psychological effect.

MONSTER- no, I'm not a vet (it's one of the big regrets I have when looking back on my life that I failed to do my duty as a citizen and serve my country), and I wish I could share your optimism.
Vietnam went on for 10 years. 10 years of our warriors getting killed, wounded, maimed, tortured after being captured, and so on.
It was seen at the time as 'not supporting the troops' to try to get them home, but the 'patriotic' thing to do was to let them get killed, etc., over there.
In the end we gained nothing and lost much. Over 50,000 of the finest of that generation dead. A nation already struggling to come to terms with important social issues was further divided.
The money borrowed to pay for the damned war of course grew due to interest, and it put a big drag on the economy in the 70s and crimped federal spending on other programs.
Before you think that we can pay for this Iraqi adventure with Iraqi oil, be aware that at peak production, Iraq will export about 15 billion dollars worth of oil.

" and they ask me why I drink"