By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
NAJAF, Iraq - With American troops closing in and a growing number of his gunmen in hiding, radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr on Wednesday offered unconditional talks with U.S. authorities seeking to kill or capture him.
His spokesman in Najaf said al Sadr, whose men have launched widespread attacks on American forces in the last week, was retreating further by dropping demands that U.S.-led coalition forces withdraw from residential areas, free Iraqi detainees and end the siege of Fallujah before negotiations could proceed.
In related news, Saddam Hussein, currently being held in an undisclosed location, has offered to withdraw his forces from Kuwait and asked that the United States not do anything "hasty."
The Marines attributed the success of their actions to studying such texts as Sun-Tsu's "The Art of War," the writings of Carl von Clausewitz, and "Getting to Yes, the USMC Way" (GTYTUW), a combination of self-help motivational primer primer and tactical guide to the use of artillery.
"I used to be afraid of trying new things," said Lance Coporal Smithereen, "But then I read GTYTUW and I really started to open up to new experiences, like the blast-fragmentation warhead for the 4.5 inch rockets. We used a bunch of them to turn a Shiite ambush into a, well, a problem for the Red Cross to deal with. Nobody laughed at me, nobody made fun of me for trying something new - it was great."
His superiors agreed. "We used to worry about the amount of conflict in our line of work," said Captain Gumbo, head of Corporal Smithereen's A Company. "We'd handicap ourselves by starting out thinking the other side was our enemy, that they wanted us to fail, and that they were a problem to be overcome. Now, after reading GTYTUW, we realize that's not the case. We're all in this together, and the screaming bands of Shiite fanatics who keep opening fire on us are really our partners in the common search for peace. Heck, if they didn't take the trouble to arm themselves and attack us, there wouldn't be any war to fight. So now we approach each firefight as elements of a team. We each have our jobs to do - ours is to lay down a shocking amount of firepower, and theirs is to be obliterated. We cooperate, we succeed. There is no I in T-E-A-M." He paused, then added, "Ironically enough, thought there are two in S-H-I-I-T-E and one in M-A-R-I-N-E-S, so who knows?"
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
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