The Dark Cloud of Democracy

On Saturday morning, October 2nd, hours after the Pentagon officially launched 'Operation Iron Fist', the Associated Press reported, "About 1,000 U.S. troops, backed by attack helicopters, swarmed into a tiny Iraqi village near the Syrian border Saturday in an offensive aimed at rooting out fighters from al-Qaida in Iraq, the country’s most feared militant group, the military said."

Being a Syrian border town, Sadah has been a target of U.S. assaults before. This weekend however, was major - 1,000 troops moved on this little village of 2,000 men, women and children.

The most sophisticated (which simply means most deadly) military in the world has sent 1,000 troops, backed warplanes and helicopters, to enter and occupy the hamlet of Sadah, and is going door to door, raiding what homes were left standing after the air assault, apparently hunting for 'insurgents'. Although it is uncertain what they will find in Sadah, what they have brought is clear. Death and destruction on a massive scale have come to yet another town in the so-called 'Sunni Triangle'.

Troops involved in the siege on this rural enclave, were backed by warplanes, such as the C-130 Specter, which hovers over its target, circling and hammering those on the ground with 105 mm rapid-fire cannons directed by it's sophisticated computer tracking systems, and helicopters such as the Apache, which has turned humans into mincemeat with its 90 mm cannons and assortment of rockets.

"Sadah is a village of about 2,000 people on the banks of the Euphrates River about eight miles from the Syrian border in Iraq's western province of Anbar. The isolated community has one main road and about 200 houses scattered over a rural area," the AP reports.

However, AP does not report why the U.S. was unable to take advantage of Sadah's isolation to quarantine and search this village without razing it (A much more humane approach to this 'humanitarian' mission to bring democracy to Iraq and its people).