Next to Last Throes

Looks like the insurgents didn't get the Cheney memo--from Juan Cole:

Gunmen stormed the former insurgent bastion of Samarra in northern Iraq yesterday, killing at least two elite police commandos and injuring as many as six.

Witnesses said armed men in as many as 10 civilian cars marauded through Samarra, a historic Tigris River shrine city filled with archaeological treasures. They attacked a building used by security forces with mortars and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. The gunmen then surrounded the hospital and began shooting at it until Iraqi and U.S. reinforcements showed up, witnesses said.

Samarra was the site of a U.S.-led assault last summer meant to rid the city of insurgents. Residents said tensions had peaked in the city after a Tuesday raid on a pharmaceutical factory by security forces.

The story goes on to list four more instances where "last throes" is, at best, the ugly, violent, decade long kind...

Cole comments:

When ten carloads of guerrillas can just drive into town and shoot it up, you know no one is really in control of the place.

Now THAT sort of sounds like Houston--at least on the loop during rush hour.