US Marines fight for Playboy spirit in Iraqi desert

CENTRAL IRAQ (AFP) Apr 01, 2003

After two months in Kuwait and two weeks in Iraq, many US Marines are grousing about why they are here -- they hate the desert and the gas masks they wear.

They just want to "clobber Saddam" and go home.There is too much time to think. Days, hours drag between the hard pumping action of a firefight and the next adrenaline rush.Often they find themselves logjammed on Iraqi highways, bumper to bumper with hardback and highback Humvees, M1-A1 Abrams tanks and seven-tonne trucks.

They speed by abandoned picnic reststops where yellow umbrella stands have blown off the tables.They broil in their camouflage-green chemical suits and yawn on highways that resemble their home country's famed Route 66 and hope to see American gas stations and convenience stores selling beer around the bend.Bored, they christen their vehicles "The Redneck Rampage", "Disposable Heroes" and "Boyz Gone Wild".They draw pictures of topless women and flash their sketches at the next car and hoot.

One Humvee plays the singalong game called "Vietnam", where they take turns belting out 1960s pop tunes. A mechanic's truck down the way cranks out heavy metal.

The marines thumb copies of Maxim, a magazine of skimpily-clad models that is a thin step up from porn and as such is banned by a US military sensitive to Muslim customs.One marine writes letters to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner."Dear Mr Hefner, old copies of your magazine have raised morale and inspired many marines and sailors here."Your example of the American can-do spirit and innovation is what we're fighting for in Iraq. It would be a great if a couple of marines could meet you after the war."

Rumours spread.Some are charming ... Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez are coming out on tour, some say.Others rattle the mind and morale: US soldiers are said to have been executed on Iraqi television.

Conversations turn to the anti-war protests unfolding around the world. They call the demonstrators "dumb", complain the troops had more support in the 1991 Gulf War and say the protesters have no idea what the marines are really doing on the ground.Others badmouth the BBC news which they receive off shortwave radio, their main source of information. They call it negative, liberal "horseshit".

People talk of hamburger joints and strip clubs, punk rock and Country and Western singer Hank Williams, Filipino curry, God and college basketball.

They wear their patriotism proudly and wrestle with their doubts.An infantryman boasts that he is ready to be part of a modern-day Roman legion to rid the world of terrorists, while a medic wonders how many countries the White House will ask him to invade before the world is safe.A young missile expert says the war is worthwhile, if it eases the suffering of the Iraqi children he has seen clutching their bellies and begging for food.

Nineteen-year-olds from big cities, away from home for the first time, struggle to find strength. They attend impromptu religious services on Sundays if a chaplain turns up, and tell the chaplain they did not believe in God until they arrived in Iraq.

The truth about casualties

BY JOHN LEO
US News and World ReportSun Mar 23

Even if civilian casualties in Iraq are light, expect a great deal of attention to the subject in the days ahead. In a number-obsessed society, focusing relentlessly on the deaths of innocents--and inflating the numbers, if necessary--is a conventional way of undermining support for war. This helps explain why dozens of civilian-casualty articles sprouted in the news media within hours of the first shots in Iraq, even before coalition ground forces swung into action

The news agencies of our chief non-allies--France, Russia, China, and Germany--were quick off the mark. Agence France Presse may have established the modern world record for fastest print coverage of dead bystanders with "U.S. Strikes Leave Civilian Casualties in Baghdad: Official" (3:42 a.m. Thursday, Eastern time). The Iraqi regime, of course, is eager for high numbers. A New York Post report Friday said civilians trying to flee Basra were blocked by Iraqi troops, who, according to Kuwaitis, were hoping to increase civilian casualties.

We have been through this before. On Fox News during the war in Afghanistan (news - web sites), Brit Hume wondered if reporting about civilian deaths was getting out of hand. These casualties, he said, "are historically, by definition, a part of war, really." Mara Liasson of National Public Radio chimed in: "War is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable."

All civilian casualties are tragic. But Hume was asking why these casualties had emerged as a major story line in coverage of the war. This emphasis may have reflected the usual press resentments toward U.S. forces in wartime (lack of candor, lack of access). But it also reflected the antiwar movement's success in convincing the mainstream press that civilian deaths were a big story.

Who's counting? A New York Times article ("Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead") relied heavily on the findings of workers with Global Exchange, which the times identified as "an American organization that has sent survey teams into Afghan villages." In fact, Global Exchange is a hard-left, antiwar, pro-Castro group whose numbers on war victims should never be taken at face value. Many groups on the left repeatedly insisted that civilian deaths were scandalously high. But that's what they say during every war. Typical headlines included "Civilian Casualties Mount in Afghanistan" (the World Socialist Web Site) and "U.S. Raids Draw Fire for Civilian Casualties" (Common Dreams News Center).

The most publicized analysis came from Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women's studies at the University of New Hampshire, who claims that between 3,700 and 4,000 Afghan civilians died in the war. Herold, an antiwar leftist, says the U.S. military is mostly white and willing to drop bombs on populous areas, thus "sacrificing the darker-skinned Afghans." Admirers credited Herold with meticulous and original analysis of many sources during 12- to 14-hour days on the Internet. Some people loved Herold's numbers because they were said to show that the United States killed more innocent people in Afghanistan than Osama bin Laden killed in New York. But several analysts accused Herold of questionable and ideological treatment of the numbers: double counting, confusing combatants with noncombatants, and, in the words of one commentator, "blind acceptance of deliberately inflated Taliban accounts."

Other less publicized estimates of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are far lower than Herold's. The Los Angeles Times put the number at 1,067 to 1,201. The Project on Defense Alternatives said 1,000 to 1,300. Reuters estimated 1,000 dead.

A similar numbers game developed after the Gulf War large estimates scaled down by calmer analysis. The radical group Greenpeace claimed as many as 15,000 Iraqi civilians died, Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s government said 20,000 to 50,000, and the American Friends Service Committee/Red Crescent went way overboard and claimed 300,000 civilians died. Accepted estimates are far lower. Human Rights Watch estimated 2,500 to 3,000. A long analysis in Foreign Policy magazine put the number of Iraqi civilian dead at 1,000.

Now the numbers game will resume. The Iraq Body Count Project ("the worldwide update of civilian casualties in the war on Iraq") will be counting deaths for us in what the project calls "the onslaught on Iraq." It is endorsed by Marc Herold and says it will be using his methods. Don't say you haven't been warned

What's gone wrong, and who's to blame

-Frontline report

By Margo Kingston
March 31 2003

International relations lecturer Scott Burchill: "This piece will give you a sense of why the battle plan has gone off the rails. What is significant is that scapegoating has begun, suggesting a lack of confidence in the eventual result which may well fall short of victory as it is commonly understood. One for the armchair strategists."

The piece was first published at Defense and the National Interest, a specialist United States military site with a motto coined by Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in The Art of War: Military action is important to the nation - it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it.

Army's race to Baghdad exposes risks in battle plan

By James Kitfield, National Journal, March 28, 2003

V CORPS FORWARD TACTICAL COMMAND, Central Iraq: The sound came with such suddenness and ferocity that all heads craned skyward as if in supplication: An Iraqi Scud missile was boring back through the atmosphere at terminal velocity. Just to the right of the 110-vehicle convoy, a Patriot anti-missile battery answered, with the sparkling contrails of two missiles clearly visible as they soared toward an impact point nearly six miles overhead.

Along the shoulder of the road, hundreds of soldiers scrambled to don chemical protection suits as a multiwheeled Fox detection vehicle ran down the column "sniffing" for lethal chemical agents. Within minutes, the Patriot battery reported a successful intercept and confirmed that the Scud would have hit the ground less than a third of a mile in front of the convoy.

In one of the convoy's three command vehicles, Lt. Col. Rick Nohmer, a tightly wound Army Ranger and West Pointer with the infantryman's ability to grow more calm as situations become increasingly tense, turned to check the occupants of his Humvee. "Well, I guess that will get everyone's head in the game," he said.

Only hours into the first day of the campaign, or "G-Day," the ground war for control of Iraq was joined.

As the convoy crested a ridge at dusk on March 20, the vista brought home the enormity of the endeavor ahead. Spread out on a high-desert bluff on the far western flank of U.S. forces in Kuwait were the 300-plus vehicles of the 3rd Infantry Division's main command headquarters. Clearly visible in attack position on the desert floor beyond was the "heavy metal"-M1-A2 tanks and armored Bradley fighting vehicles, all painted desert camouflage-part of the division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team.

Other 3rd Infantry elements and a Marine expeditionary force were assigned the objectives nearest to Kuwait in southeastern Iraq and encountered both the most fighting and the majority of the press coverage in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nevertheless, the secret battle plan always envisioned this western task force as the main effort and linchpin of the campaign.

V Corps commander Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the officer in charge of all Army maneuver forces and the one responsible for overseeing the battle for Baghdad, continually drums into his senior commanders that Iraqi Freedom is about regime change and liberation. The objective is Baghdad. From the earliest stages, planners identified the center of gravity in that fight as the Republican Guard's elite Medina Division, which is guarding the southern approaches to the Iraqi capital. If the Medina chooses to stand and fight, V Corps commanders planned not only to defeat it, but also to send a message by trying to bring the war to a rapid conclusion with the division's utter destruction.

"We always regarded Baghdad as the point where we would eventually have to apply pressure in this fight, and our judgment was that the quicker and more dynamically we applied that pressure, the better off we would be," Wallace told National Journal. "As for the Medina, it's important among the Republican Guard divisions by consequence of its position to the south. And I've told my soldiers and anyone else who would listen that we shouldn't underestimate the Republican Guard, or build our battle plan on the assumption that they might not fight. I'm expecting a tough fight from the Republican Guard."

The forces gathered in the westernmost attack positions on G-Day, including advance support elements of the 101st Airborne Division, were thus poised to conduct a three-day surprise march up the desert wastelands of western Iraq. Their goal was to bring the fight early and decisively to the Republican Guard camped at Baghdad's outskirts.

In terms of tempo, distances covered, and the difficulty of the terrain involved, the march would be the longest and most audacious movement toward an enemy for a U.S. Army corps since Gen. George Patton ranged North Africa stalking the vaunted Afrika Korps of German Gen. Erwin Rommel.

Sometime after nightfall on the first day of the war, the officers and senior sergeants of V Corps's Forward Tactical Command Centercalled a TACgathered on the bluff to witness the 3rd Infantry Division's expected artillery barrage of Iraqi border posts. The very fact that the tactical headquarters of a corps commanding nearly three divisions' worth of combat power would be exposing itself so close to the front line was a clear indication of the primacy put on synchronization and tempo in this campaign. Upon arriving south of Baghdad, the V Corps TAC would immediately begin managing the fight with the Medina.

Behind the decision to engage Iraq's elite forces on multiple fronts was the U.S. commanders' conviction that such relentless pressure might overwhelm Iraqi command-and-control capabilities and maximize chances that the enemy would quit the fight. Iraqi forces reeling from simultaneous onslaughts were also thought to be less likely to mount a coordinated attack with chemical or biological weapons. The greatest defense against such weapons, U.S. commanders reasoned, would be the rapid maneuvering of U.S. forces. Finally, and perhaps most important, keeping Iraqi forces continually on the defensive would mask vulnerabilities and risks inherent in the bold U.S. battle plan.

Right on time at 1700 "Zulu," or Greenwich Mean Time, the big guns and multiple-launch rocket systems of the 3rd Infantry Division artillery brigade opened up on Iraqi border posts. Muzzle blasts flashed across the dark desert floor, the thunderous impact sounding in the far distance like the approach of an agitated giant. For men on the eve of battle, the barrage elicited only quiet commentary. Everyone understood without saying so that, somewhere out there, real people were dying.

Standing on the bluff, Lt. Col. Rob Baker, field commander of the V Corps forward headquarters unit and the corps's deputy operations officer, wondered what daylight would reveal. "I don't think until you see the physical carnage of battlethe dead and bloated bodiesdoes the reality sink in of what this business is all about," said Baker, a West Point graduate who served as an infantry platoon leader during the 1983 invasion of Grenada. A man with the quiet air of natural command, and Wallace's designated eyes and ears for the battle to come, Baker had thought long and hard about what the next days would bring.

"My greatest concern in the early stages of this campaign will be getting all my personnel and equipment to our forward objective as fast as possible, because the move we're about to make will be unprecedented in terms of the pace of our operations and the distance covered," Baker said. "We'll be moving in a matter of days forces that would have taken months to advance during World War II. That's why it's so important that we keep the pressure on the Iraqi army nonstop with deep attack, with Air Force close-air support, and with our maneuver ground forces. We know we're superior technologically to the Iraqi army. The place we'll be taking risks is in stretching our logistics lines over 500 kilometers through territory that may not be that secure once our lead elements have passed."

Modern-Day Blitzkrieg

The genesis of the battle plan was a what-if session over beers among a handful of Army majors nearly 17 months ago. They were all students at the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies, known colloquially as SAMS, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where the Army's most promising planners take a graduate course in strategic campaigns. The young majors brainstormed about a march on Baghdad to dispose of Saddam Hussein. In its earliest versions, the plan envisioned a 125-day campaign by a U.S. force nearly twice the size of that now in Iraq.

Maj. Kevin Marcus, a SAMS graduate now attached to V Corps headquarters, helped develop the plan from a back-of-an-envelope exercise into a PowerPoint presentation that within days of being finished ended up on the desk of the president of the United States. Though any military campaign plan of the size of Iraqi Freedom has many midwivesand for this one, they include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself, who prodded planners to think outside the boxMarcus saw it develop from infancy to fruition.

From the very beginning, he says, the need to synchronize a rapid, combined-arms campaign to seize the initiative with "shock and awe"roughly the modern-day equivalent of armored blitzkrieg warfareleapt out at planners determined to limit the opportunity for Iraqi forces to employ chemical weapons, wreak environmental havoc, or organize a coordinated defense. In bullfighter parlance, they wanted to go for a quick kill before the bull learned the trick of the cape.

"The essence of this challenge was always our advantage in technology and mobility against the Iraqi forces' advantage in terrain, because they are occupying defensible terrain," said Marcus, who along with Lt. Col. E.J. Degen is responsible for constantly updating the battle plan at the mobile V Corps headquarters. "That means synchronization and operations tempo are critical to this battle plan. We need to do this fast, so that Iraqi forces can't tell from where they are being hit or how we are hitting them. That way, they can't effectively counter our attack."

From the plan's very inception, the emphasis on rapid movement, and the difficulty of the variable terrain between Kuwait and Baghdad, presented unique challenges. U.S. maneuver forces would be moving and fighting not only over the flat brown expanses of the vast Iraqi desert, but through the fertile and lush Euphrates River valley.

To take the fight quickly into Baghdada city of more than 5 million that dwarfs in size and population either Stalingrad or Berlin during World War IIthese forces would need to seize key bridges and make multiple river crossings with the help of combat engineers. The logistics train supplying critical fuel, ammunition, and food to front-line forces would stretch hundreds of miles. At one point, Army planners even looked at moving supplies by barge up the Euphrates to speed the supply chain, and a special Army railroad unit studied the feasibility of quickly repairing Iraq's north-south railroad line.

And right up until the launch of the war, the plan kept changing. Although every soldier knows that no plan survives the firing of the first shot, in truth the battle plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom barely survived the dawning of the war's first day. An intelligence intercept of Iraqi signals traffic prompted U.S. commanders to authorize a surprise cruise missile attack in the early hours of March 20. "We almost got the bastard," said an intelligence source at V Corps headquarters. The decision to launch that "decapitation strike" pushed the timelines for the ground offensive up 24 hours and threw off the air-tasking order that determined what aircraft were available to support forward ground troops.

Just days before the war began, U.S. commanders had also seriously considered changing the battle plan to allow for a strategic pause at the key southern crossroads city of An Nasiriya. Such a pause would give U.S. forces time to accept the expected surrender of the 11th Division of the regular Iraqi army that defends that city, and give Republican Guard forces near Baghdad an opportunity to capitulate as well. The plan was dropped at the last minute.

Likewise, the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division's inability to launch a northern front through Turkey, although played down to the media, was also a major setback, because it raised the risk of instability in the north and the possible freeing of the Republican Guard's Nebuchadnezzar Division north of Baghdad to reinforce its sister units ringing the city.

Scrapping the Plan

By far the most dramatic and disruptive change to the battle plan, however, was Rumsfeld's decision last November to slash Central Command's request for forces. This single decision essentially cut the size of the anticipated assault force in half in the final stages of planning, and it had a ripple effect on Central Command and Army planning that continues to color operations to this day.

Notably, the Pentagon scrapped the Time Phased Force Deployment Data, or "TipFid," by which regional commanders would identify forces needed for a specific campaign, and the individual armed services would manage their deployments by order of priority. The result has meant that even as Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks was launching the war, forces identified for the fight continued to pour off ships in the Kuwaiti port of Doha, and not necessarily in the order of first priority.

"A lot of people around here can get very emotional talking about the lack of a TipFid for this operation," said a knowledgeable source at V Corps headquarters. "It would also be awfully nice to have another division to secure the supply routes and cities between An Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad, because we assume a lot of risk [by] leaving that much territory largely unguarded."

The lack of a TipFid and the piecemeal nature of the deployment also necessitated this "rolling start" to the war. In essence, Central Command and V Corps commanders are focusing on fighting the forward battle while trying to manage the unloading and flow of additional forces into the rear. The extra strain this has placed on an already-stressed supply chain has been exacerbated by the fact that critical additional support forces were eliminated when the decision was made to cut the forces in half.

"We basically spent a year building a force package that included very robust command-and-control for our support elements," said Brig. Gen. Charles Fletcher, who heads the 3rd Corps Support Command, called COSCOM, which is responsible for supplying Army forces in the Iraq theater. "When the decision was made to only go with half our force, we only had a very short time to adjust" the shipping orders that would enable us to get the right forces to Kuwait. He continued: "So while that decision may have been smart from a strategic viewpoint, it has had a trickle-down impact on all our operations. I have never received my entire communications package, for instance, complicating secure communications over a supply chain stretching hundreds of kilometers."

The Pentagon's decision not to activate many transportation Reserve units before last Christmas also created personnel shortages. Meanwhile, COSCOM itself has only 150 heavy transport trucks for an operation that Army planners estimate requires 700.

"We're going to war not with what we need, but with what we have on the ground, so we threw away the doctrinal books on this operation a long time ago," said Fletcher, noting that his transport units also have far less maintenance support than normal. "I believe we will still make it all work, but I don't doubt that we face some hard choices in the coming days between supporting our soldiers forward with ammo, fuel, and equipment, and facilitating the continued offloading of ships in port and movement of forces forward."

Desert Dash

In the end, the tremendous synchronization that this rapid operation requires could be seen one night when two Army convoys suddenly converged on a lonely goat trail. The tempers of the convoys' officers were short, and the officers' reflexes were dulled by a more than 30-hour road march through the treacherous wadis and axle-deep sands of the western Iraqi desert.

With the 2nd Brigade's armor screening out front, V Corps's tactical headquarters convoy and its numerous combat support columns topped 1,000 vehiclesand all were jockeying for position throughout the night. At numerous clogged crossroads, senior officers from different units shouted and gestured at one another, trying to maintain the integrity of their convoys in a dust cloud and possibly gain a precious few hours in the march northward. Occasionally, cruise missiles, with their unearthly whine, would fly low overhead on their way to Baghdad.

At the first of three refuel-on-the-move sites, the convoys gathered around fuel trucks at an allotted Global Positioning System set of coordinates on a patch of featureless desert. Soldiers acting as refuelers appeared asleep on their feet, standing under arc lights in a cold rain as they topped off endless lines of vehicles with fuel for the next leg of the trip north. Over the next 18 hours, refuelers would service more than 1,500 vehicles. Nevertheless, before the road march was done after more than 50 hours, some of the convoys would stall in place for lack of fuel.

After the 30-hour mark of ceaseless desert travel, the accidents came in clusters. Riding herd on a convoy of massive machinery stretching eight miles over broken and treacherous terrain may seem simple, but it requires intricate orchestration. By midafternoon on the war's second day, glassy-eyed convoy commanders struggled even to remember their radio call signs, and the heads of many drivers drooped to their chests at each stop.

All along the route, overturned cargo vehicles, fuel trucks, and broken Humvees littered the landscape. Those vehicles that could not be immediately serviced were either left behind or hooked to massive tow trucks, lest a delay encourage the trailing convoy to try to jump the line. But after yet another accident, Baker decided to halt the convoy and let its weary members bed down for the night: A V Corps TAC soldier had fallen asleep at the wheel of a 5-ton transport truck and rear-ended a Humvee and trailer, destroying a generator and in turn being rear-ended by a tow truck, whose radiator was smashed.

Pulling into a "box formation" reminiscent of settlers circling the wagons in Indian territory, Baker placed military police vehicles on the perimeter to guard his soldiers and gave his charges a few hours of well-earned rest. A nine-person maintenance pit crew worked overtime to cannibalize parts and patch together broken vehicles for tomorrow's march. Under a brilliant star-studded sky, the lights of similar encampments were visible stretched across the desert flatlands.

Pointing out the belt of Orion, Sgt. 1st Class David Ball kept an ear to a shortwave radio broadcasting BBC war reports. News of the first American soldiers and marines killed in action came in over the airwaves. "You know, this whole operation is so similar to how we train, that in a way it's hard to grasp that it's real this time," said Ball, a 17-year veteran whose competence and indefatigable good cheer are typical of the noncommissioned officer corps, the backbone of the U.S. Army. "Hearing about those KIAs and casualties kind of makes it hit home," he said.

"Can you pick up any basketball on that radio?" asked Maj. Joe Samek, an engineer attached to the V Corps TAC. "I'm missing March Madness again. Then again, I guess we're having our own March Madness out here."

Stretched Thin

On the 50th anniversary commemorating the Battle of the Bulge, COSCOM commander Fletcher went to Europe and bicycled the same route between Cherbourg and Bastogne in France that Patton's 3rd Army had followed on its famous march to relieve Army forces surrounded by German troops during a last-ditch counteroffensive that began on December 16, 1944. In a desperate attempt to keep Patton from outrunning his supply lines, the Army launched the "Red Ball Express," a transportation bucket brigade that pushed supplies across France hurriedly in the 3rd Army's burning wake.

Fletcher sees strong similarities between that operation and the current effort to resupply V Corps along a 310-mile logistics trail stretching from Kuwait to Baghdad's outskirts. "The Red Ball Express was a defining moment in the establishment of the transportation corps, because it was really the first attempt at resupplying a mobile armored force on a breakout offensive," said Fletcher. "This operation is similar, because we've never operated on these long lines of supply before."

As the adage goes, armchair strategists talk forces while military professionals talk logistics. And the logistics of Iraqi Freedom break down to a set of daunting statistics. An armored or air-mobile division on the move consumes roughly 550,000 gallons of fuel a day. COSCOM, just to supply V Corps's forward forces with the requisite 1 million gallons of fuel, must have 3 million gallons in its pipeline. Each of the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in the Iraqi theater, meanwhile, consumes at least a liter of water an hour. The harder those units and soldiers fight, the higher their ammunition, fuel, and water requirements climb. The longer the logistics pipeline stretches, the greater the strain on inadequate transportation equipment.

Fletcher's COSCOM forces, which outnumber any U.S. fighting division in the theater, are attempting to fill those gaps in capability on the ground with technology and synchronization. "Doctrinally, we typically travel in large formations with short communications lines, so trucks without GPS, and radios with only a 30-kilometer range, are standard," Fletcher said. "With our logistics lines now stretching over 500 kilometers in some cases, we had to turn to satellite communications and other technology."

COSCOM purchased 400 commercial satellite trackers off the shelf so it could always locate its highest-priority vehicles, including many fuel trucks, ambulances, and MP command vehicles. Satellite phones were purchased for many drivers. High-priority cargo containers were labeled with radio-frequency tags that reveal their location and contents at a simple query from headquarters. An Army Movement Tracking System that uses technology similar to "E-ZPass" highway tollbooth cards identifies much of the other cargo. Movement-control teams armed with computer software that has analyzed optimum traffic flow and detours at every key crossroads and intersection on the road to Baghdad will also help manage traffic congestion. In the event all of that should fail, plans are in place to airdrop supplies to isolated units or those running dangerously low on critical supplies.

However, the capture and apparent execution of some members of a lost U.S. maintenance crew, as well as spot reports that some U.S. combat units at the front were running low on fuel and ammo, clearly reveal the substantial risks that U.S. commanders assumed by pushing combat forces so far on such short timelines while leaving hundreds of miles of Iraqi territory unsecured.

Despite the obvious strains on logistics forces, Fletcher pledged to write a new ending for the modern-day Red Ball Express by avoiding a repeat of every logistician's worst nightmare, as occurred in World War II: Patton's lead tank companies ran out of gas and stalled outside of Metz, France, where they became fodder for German Panzers.

"We've accepted some significant risks given the mission and our battle plan, which is all the more reason why we need to win this war quickly," said Fletcher. "But our forces are not going to run out of gas."

Final Dash

Soldiers of the V Corps TAC convoy were pulled reluctantly out of their sleeping bags at 0600 on March 23, and told to pack up and be ready to leave two hours ahead of schedule. Lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division had gotten into a firefight with two Iraqi battalions of loyalists called Fedayeen Saddam at the convoy's forward objective, and they needed the TAC to move forward and set up a "hot" zone in order to be able to call in Air Force close-air support. The MP detachment was warned to prepare to test-fire their weapons, and every soldier in the convoy locked magazines into their M-16 rifles and 9 mm sidearms.

At the oasis town of Al Salman, in the shadow of an old fortress on a hill, the empty western desert finally gave way to palm orchards and camel herds. Many of the villagers lined the sides of the street in flowing robes, with the children and teenagers waving American flags and shouting encouragement. The heady sense of liberation visibly lifted the spirits of American soldiers, most of whom were in a foreign country, uninvited, for the very first time.

"I volunteered for this operation because I only have one more year in the Army, and I wanted to do something with it," said Pfc. Eric Juarez, who was on loan from his normal artillery unit at Fort Sill, Okla. "Seeing these people wave American flags and shout at us, that makes me feel like we're doing something right."

Was the experience enough to make him consider re-enlisting?

"No," Juarez said. "I don't know where the next war will be, but I think I'll catch it on TV."

As the convoy approached its forward objective late that afternoon, the sights and sounds of nearby combat were everywhere. Broken-down M-1 tanks blocked a shoulder of the road, and three plumes of thick smoke marred the near horizon. Over the tactical radio network, lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division could be heard fighting the Fedayeen Saddam, the urgency of combat unmistakable in their voices. Somewhat to the surprise of U.S. commanders, the outgunned Iraqis had stood and held their ground, fighting to the death in some cases (an estimated 80 Iraqis were killed in action). Before another 48 hours had passed, the estimated death toll of Iraqis attempting to block the probing of U.S. forces near Baghdad would climb above 800.

"We all assumed there would be a higher degree of capitulation than we've seen, but intelligence indicates that Saddam has pushed these Fedayeen enforcers out of Baghdad and into the population centers, and they're stiffening resistance and preventing uprisings," Wallace said during an interview in the forward TAC. "The Iraqis are not fighting or holding back out of loyalty to the regime, but because they have a gun to their heads."

Despite the unexpectedly heavy resistance, a nearly corps-sized U.S. Army combat force had traveled 322 miles in 54 hours, over difficult and variable terrain, to strike a blow directly at the enemy's center of gravity. Among the dog-tired troops who made that journey, the knowledge that no other army in the world could have accomplished the task was a point of considerable pride. By nightfall on March 24, four days into the war, V Corps's "hot" TAC operations center was launching Apache attack helicopters from its 11th Aviation Brigade directly against elements of the Republican Guard's Medina Division.

Standing outside the TAC operations tent that night, Lt. Col. Eric Wagenaar, the deputy officer in charge of the V Corps Forward TAC, watched as a flock of Apaches roared past overhead, then became dark silhouettes against the twinkling lights of a distant city. Wagenaar is the affable offspring of Dutch immigrants whose love of their adopted country inspired all three sons to wear the uniform of the U.S. Army. Gazing at the Apaches, he expressed a sense of awe as well as anxiety at what the U.S. military was about to undertake.

"If you can't get a rise out of seeing those Apaches launch out into the night, then something is wrong with you," Wagenaar said, his voice rising to be heard above the backwash of the helicopter rotors. "I worry about those pilots, though. We're sending them against some really tough targets tonight."

A Strange Land

Within hours, Wagenaar's fears proved prophetic. One Apache did not return from the mission. Later in the day, its crew appeared as prisoners of war on Iraqi television. V Corps immediately called in an artillery strike that destroyed the downed Apache. Of the more than 30 aircraft that had taken off the night before, virtually all of the Apaches returned pocked and scarred by enemy fire.

In reviewing the gun-camera video, U.S. commanders noticed a queer thing. As the Apaches approached the outskirts of the urban area, all of the lights in the city appeared to flicker out for a moment, and then to come on again along with a curtain of anti-aircraft fire. It was as if the dimmed lights were a signal to Republican Guard gunners lying in wait.

"You may recall that we had contingency plans for a possible capitulation of Republican Guard forces," V Corps operations chief Col. Steve Hicks told his assembled commanders. "Well, I have a news flash for you. They aren't quitting."

In recent days, 3rd Infantry commanders have witnessed another disturbing phenomenon of this war. Family members of the hundreds of Fedayeen Saddam irregulars killed in recent battles approached U.S. security lines to collect their dead from the battlefield. According to U.S. soldiers who escorted the relatives, many of the Iraqis stood over the bodies of their loved ones and cursed them to Allah for dying in the name of Saddam Hussein. But they cursed the Americans, too.

Even as lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division cross the Euphrates River and seize key bridges in preparation for the final assault, positioning V Corps for what its planners have always envisioned as perhaps the key battle in this war, a freakish storm has blown across this strange land. On March 25, the rays of a late-day sun were trapped in a massive dust cloud, turning the entire landscape an unworldly shade of burnt red. No one can recall ever seeing something so eerie. Under the circumstances, the storm seems full of portent, although its meaning is any soldier's guess. Very soon now, the storm will lift, and the battle with the Medina Division will begin.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/31/1048962686503.html

For Iraq's sake, keep the home ire burning

By Adele Horin
March 29 2003

John Howard has appealed to Australians to support our troops in Iraq regardless of our views on the Government policies that sent them there.

And as Australians have watched the television images of the young, sometimes bewildered, soldiers in the battle zone, opinion appears to have shifted.

The latest Newspoll revealed 50 per cent of Australians were in favour of "Australian troops being involved in military action against Iraq". The question this time failed to include the words "without UN support", which had been asked in previous Newspolls. Their inclusion may have altered the result. Even so, it is clear that opposition to our involvement in the war is softening as Australians rally behind "our team".

That we have seen precious few images of the Australian troops in action - the shadowy SAS is far from the cameras - matters not. The sense that it may be disloyal, even traitorous, to maintain vociferous protest when Australian soldiers are facing death could muffle dissent, derail the critics.

To go softly now would send the wrong message. The Howard Government has played on people's natural sympathies for the troops to harness support for a war Australians never wanted. Back in

February, only 6 per cent of Australians were in favour of war without UN backing.

It is important to maintain the protest to keep the Government honest. The concern shown by the Australian, US and British Governments to minimise civilian casualties is a product, at least partly, of the knowledge that support for this war is paper-thin around the world. It could evaporate overnight if the corpses mount and the "liberators" bring unnecessary death and destruction to the Iraqi people.

The tens of thousands of mums and dads, senior citizens and suburbanites who took to the streets in unprecedented numbers in mid-February have put governments on notice to take care. In the Kosovo and Afghanistan actions, where bombs exacted a terrible toll, there were no such scruples because there were relatively few objectors in the West.

Governments need to know they are being scrutinised, that they don't have free rein. The Australian Government's emphasis on troops respecting the rules of engagement is also strengthened by the protests. If the Government believes for one minute it has the home population unequivocally behind it, who knows what could be unleashed to help secure a victory at all costs?

Even though we are at war, protest and expressed opposition is vitally important. It can act to restrain war's excesses.

If we succumb wholly to barracking for "our team", as if we were watching another round in the World Cup, we will forget the broader context of this war. No matter how scared and vulnerable our troops may be, their anxiety is nothing compared with the suffering of the Iraqi people terrorised by the bombing and shelling. The allied soldiers, though obliged to follow orders, have joined the military of their own free will, and are well paid and fed. Our SAS men are highly efficient professionals, doing what they joined up to do.

On the other hand, five-year-old Doha Suheil was at home with her family in the suburbs of Baghdad when a cruise missile exploded nearby, blasting shrapnel into her legs and spine and leaving her partly paralysed. One day, someone will explain to her that she paid the price for ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (wherever they may be).

Basra's residents, who had nothing to do with September 11, have been left with no clean water, little food and staring into disaster. They are being punished for the sins of their dictator and the ambitions of George Bush.

Even in a careful, tightly targeted war, civilians die, conscript soldiers are slaughtered, wives lose husbands to "friendly fire" and children lose fathers to equipment failures. And Australia is playing its part in these deaths in order to keep the US grateful and on side.

This is the context to keep in mind when the instinct to barrack for our team seems overwhelming. When some US general praises the SAS's achievements and pride swells the national breast, it is important to remember this is an illegal war in the view of many scholars. It will marginalise the UN, unleash a new era of insecurity and free other nations to launch pre-emptive wars.

It will be more likely to inflame rather than quell terrorism. And many military men, including General Peter Gration, who was chief of the Australian Defence Force during the last Gulf War, consider it unnecessary, given that policies of containment and deterrence had already weakened the Iraqi regime.

It is only natural to wish our soldiers well, and to hope the war is over quickly. But this conflict is no cricket match. One-eyed support is impossible. Protest is not disloyalty to the troops. It will keep the Government on a leash. In the end, Iraqis and Australian soldiers may be grateful for the restraint.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/28/1048653852765.html

Bring our troops home

By Margo Kingston
March 31 2003

Despite the fact that our troops are fighting this mad, bad war, Australians must protest for all they're worth to bring our troops home and extricate Australia from this American imperial crusade before it's too late.

Adele Horin's article in Saturday's Herald made a compelling case for continuing, intensive protests to keep the Coalition honest in their conduct of this war.

But there's a broader issue. Australia is at grave risk. This should never have been our war. We would have been obliged to participate if the UN sanctioned this war for the sake of our alliance with the US, but without that we should have done a Canada and stayed out of it. Australia is an innocent abroad in the Middle East. Unlike Britain, we have never been a colonial power. Unlike the US, we have never propped up evil regimes like Saddam's. We must get out, as soon as possible.

It's clear we've been lied to by Bush and by Howard, both about this war's purpose, and its risks. The blind arrogance of Bush and his mates is beyond belief. Bush is in the process of uniting Arab peoples around the world by turning Saddam, of all people, into a martyr for Islam. And the war on terrorism? What chance help from Indonesia, Pakistan and the rest now that their peoples are on the march.

I realised Bush was mad when his army chiefs starting calling suicide bombers and guerilla fighters "terrorists". For God sake, it's their country, and they're facing overwhelming force! The US is INVADING Iraq, to take it over - their bodies are in some cases the only effective weapon they've got.

It's so obvious that what Bush is doing will case an arms race, not reduce it. No country can hope to beat the Yanks off with conventional weapons - they've got air, sea and land completely covered. The only recourse is chemical, biological and nuclear weapons (the Yanks used them in Vietnam, and have not ruled out using them in this war). It's all there is that can deter a rampaging rogue superpower which has trashed international law and international institutions to get its own way.

And as I've said before, if Australia is attacked, it's no longer terrorism. We have invaded Iraq. Iraq, or its new allies, have every right to attack back. Again, they haven't got the weapons and systems to launch a conventional attack, so why wouldn't they use unconventional methods? Because they would kill civilians? We're doing that right now in Iraq.

There is no comfort at all in knowing that Bush, Blair and Howard knew exactly what risks they were taking and have no excuses. The top level intelligence leaks, the warnings from former top defence brass, the foreign affairs warnings, all were to no avail. What role did Australia play in this misconceived plan of attack? Why did Howard ignore his intelligence advice that this war would increase, not reduce, the risk of terrorism? Why did he deny that the threat to world stability posed by this conflict was far worse than Saddam - head of a third world, internationally isolated, obsessively monitored regime?

In Tony Blair: The whole world's in his hands : I published a Jane's Defence Weekly analysis of March 5 of the disquiet in the British and American intelligence community about what was going on.

An extract:

While Bush administration officials deride opposition to a war against Iraq as the usual "peacenik" reflex, Jane Defence Weekly sources say that dissenting views are now also coming from those who have traditionally supported military action.

...The fundamental questions of why now, and why Iraq, have not been adequately answered, intelligence, military and legislative sources in Washington told JDW. Sources said that the Bush administration's changing arguments for military action appear to confirm that none of them is sufficient to justify the use of military force.

One congressional source said that the arguments in favour of a war increasingly seem to be a "smokescreen" to hide the real reasons the administration is set on war.

Indeed, both the US and UK intelligence information supposedly justifying a war with Iraq raise serious questions. "[Chief of the UN weapons inspectors Hans] Blix's criticism pokes holes in [US Secretary of State Colin] Powell's intelligence," said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "And the UK's intelligence dossier was shown to be a complete fraud."

A US military source said that Bush and his inner circle seem to be suffering from what is known in the Department of Defence as incestuous amplification. This is a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation. An illustration of this was Bush's address to the American Enterprise Institute - a right-wing think tank in Washington - last Wednesday on why military action was required.

Today John Bennett sent me "Once more into the swap" by The Toronto Sun's contributing foreign editor Eric Margolis, which includes this chilling summary of the bloindness of the madmen in America:

The immediate uprisings against Great Satan Saddam, the quick, almost effortless "liberation" of Iraq, and the joyous reception by grateful Iraqis promised by the neo-conservatives who misled America into this increasingly ugly war have been exposed as a farrago of lies or distortions.

...The CIA and many American generals warned for months that: a) there might be no mass uprisings against Saddam's regime; b) over-extended U.S. communications would be vulnerable; c) the invasion force lacked sufficient ground troops to conquer Iraq; d) Turkey's refusal to admit the U.S. 4th Mechanized Division would wrong-foot the campaign.

In his eagerness for war, President George Bush ignored these warnings. So did the civilian neo-con war hawks running his administration, few of whom, save Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had ever served in their nation's armed forces.

We've been lied to. Howard has lied to us - witness his dismissal of ONA defector Andrew Wilke, who warned that this war had nothing whatsoever to do with WMDs and would increase the risk of terrorism, not reduce it.

Howard has already proved himself a failure as a war time leader. Instead of trying to pull the country together, he has played his standard wedge politics game - thus further enraging the opponents of war. Webdiarist Chris Munson sums up his latest disgusting trick:

"I notice that John Howard is using his saddening tactic of drawing a false conclusion, and then presenting lots of awesome facts to defend it. Last week it was something like: "I would like to say to those pacifists who declare that the war should have been over by now ..... should take a reality check and be aware that ..."

Well, just like the other great lies of John Howard, I know of no-one who has ever said that. This is the same tactic as "if you are against the war you are against our troops" and "If you believe in giving Saddam and the weapons inspectors more time, then you are participating in the destruction of ANZUS, NATO, the UN and bringing forward the end of the universe".

This tactic is sickening, but it was seemingly successful in the kids overboard and Tampa. So much so that in Canberra only one solitary liberal voice uttered words of concern about our participating in the US/UK/Aust "Axis of 3" That solitary politician said simply that he had concerns about it.

This does not bode well for Australia, for our future Prime Minister was silent, as were the other 40 or more liberal politicians who must also have had concerns. In the face of deputy sheriff John, they all were silent!

Where is Paul Keating now - we need him!

The reality is the opposite, of course. As a Webdiarist wrote recently, it is the pacifists in this debate who were the realists, not the warmongers. It is the American madmen who promised a quick war.

Former Webdiarist Tim Dunlop is tracking the lies, and the new spin, on his wonderful weblog The road to surfdom. He writes:

There is a big conservative campaign going at the moment to rewrite history and pretend that they, the officials who launched this war, have told us from the beginning that it would take a long time. The fact is, it is the antiwar types who have warned that this might drag on, not hawks like Howard. The notion of sacrifice and difficulty has been notably absent from most of the President's public script-reading.

The fact is the pro-war commentary, from the blogs through to the Whitehouse, was filled with endless reassurances that this would be a quick, clean war, in and out like a flash, with the Iraqi people falling at our feet. To pretend now that this is something they warned us about all along is patent nonsense; or if you prefer, par-for-the-course lying. Where they have dealt with the scenario that it mightn't be that quick and easy, they have played it down, mentioned it as an afterthought, and always preceded it with the rosier, "most likely" option.

Listen to Dick Cheney a mere few weeks ago:

MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who's a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he's written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

Now, if we get into a significant battle in Baghdad, I think it would be under circumstances in which the security forces around Saddam Hussein, the special Republican Guard, and the special security organization, several thousand strong, that in effect are the close-in defenders of the regime, they might, in fact, try to put up such a struggle. I think the regular army will not. My guess is even significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely as well to want to avoid conflict with the U.S. forces, and are likely to step aside.

Now, I can't say with certainty that there will be no battle for Baghdad. We have to be prepared for that possibility. But, again, I don't want to convey to the American people the idea that this is a cost-free operation. Nobody can say that. I do think there's no doubt about the outcome. There's no question about who is going to prevail if there is military action. And there's no question but what it is going to be cheaper and less costly to do it now than it will be to wait a year or two years or three years until he's developed even more deadly weapons, perhaps nuclear weapons. And the consequences then of having to deal with him would be far more costly than will be the circumstances today. Delay does not help.

Even at the launch of the war, there was not much attention payed to length and difficulty and again, it was played down. Bush said:

"Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory."

The tone and emphasis now has shifted considerably, as Howard's "reality check" comment shows. In fact, Howard's comments directly contradict the President's as Howard is claiming the moral highground by pointing out the fact that they are using "half-measures" to lessen civilian casualties.

The really stupid thing is that, by almost any standards, this war is going quite quickly and is relatively casualty free. It is still appalling, and the humanitarian disaster is probably in the not-too-distant future, but so far things could certainly have been worse.

As with everything else about this war, the official hawks and their spruikers in the public sphere have oversold and misled creating false expectations. And if you want to to prepare yourself for the next build-up and backdown, you need look no further than the promise that the US will get out of Iraq very quickly. Cheney again, same interview:

MR. RUSSERT: The army's top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and weve deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement.

How long before "we" are asked to take another "reality check"?

Labor has betrayed Australia by failing to force Howard to account for his proposed actions before he went to war. It is still betraying Australia by not holding him to account for what he's done. Crean has failed, utterly. A decent ALP would get rid of him and agree on a successor to take over immediately. The ALP has been cowed by Howard's political ascendancy. This must stop now.

Saudi Shiites mistrustful of Americans' motives

U.S. troops met hostility, not hospitality in Iraq Scenes of siege, civilian deaths fuel cross-border anger

MARTIN REGG COHNASIA BUREAU, Toronto Star
Mar. 31, 2003. 01:00 AM

AL-QATIF—Shiite Muslims living in this oil-rich kingdom aren't surprised that their brethren in Southern Iraq haven't welcomed invading troops with flowers and sweet tea.

They think they know why: In the Middle East, America's motives can't be trusted.

People here felt betrayed when their fellow Shiites revolted against Saddam Hussein's rule after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, while the U.S. stood idle. These days, they are exasperated by satellite television broadcasts showing Palestinians suffering in their intifada, while America stands by Israel.

Now, after seeing the scenes of siege and civilian deaths in neighbouring Iraq, Saudi Shiites are even more mistrustful of the U.S. Little wonder, they say, that their brethren across the border are feeling only hostility, not hospitality, toward the Anglo-American interlopers laying siege to Basra in southern Iraq.

"They're not killing Saddam, they're killing ordinary people, old and young," says retired oil worker Saeed Al Saffar, 55, as he cradles his 2-year-old daughter Fatima."Saddam is bad, but the Americans are worse than him," says Al Saffar, a lifelong resident of this oasis town of 400,000 Shiites on Saudi Arabia's east coast."Look what they're doing to the Palestinians. Now they're doing exactly the same thing to the Iraqis."

Coming from Saudis, that's a harsh indictment.This is America's oldest and firmest Arab ally in the Middle East. Its eastern province is home to most of Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority, and repository of the country's oil reserves.Americans have been coming here for decades, extracting oil while pumping money into the local economy. Many Saudis, in turn, have gone to America to study and seen their province benefit from modernization.

Yet for all their fond memories, they say the U.S. has gone too far this time. Shiites feel U.S. soldiers are too close for comfort — and that Saudi Arabia may be next in America's sights.

"I think after Iraq the Americans may go after Syria next, then Iran, and maybe Saudi Arabia," says store clerk Fadil Saleh, 23. "The American military is bombing houses and hospitals, and it's an outrage."

For local writer and political activist Najeeb Al-Khonaizi, the hostility on both sides of the border is to be expected. The liberation of Iraq and liberalization of Saudi Arabia cannot be imposed by force.

"War is war," he says in an interview in his living room. "The U.S. and its allies didn't judge the situation well before they got into this war."

He believes Iraqi Shiites are leery of American plans for post-war occupation. As evidence, he cites televised images of U.S. troops planting the Stars and Stripes on Iraqi soil in the early days of fighting. "You can't link yourself to a foreign power, it is against religious principles," says Al-Khonaizi. "The U.S. lacks the moral qualifications to do it (liberate Iraq), because their hands are not clean because of the Zionists."

Despite the local skepticism, Washington is still holding out hope that the Iraqi Shiites will come onside in the days ahead. Though chastened, many American analysts argue that the Shiites are merely biding their time until Saddam's grip on power is loosened.

At a Senate hearing last week, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued that "they've been repressed, and they are in the present time in Basra assisting us."

But Al-Khonaizi believes that's wishful thinking. Like many Saudis, he believes America's war agenda has been written by influential Jewish officials in Washington who have somehow hijacked policymaking and manipulated the best and the brightest in the capital to do Israel's bidding. Though he is eager to see the Shiites freed of Saddam's rule, he doesn't want it replaced by what he sees as American-Zionist hegemony."On the one hand we are against Saddam and want a change in regime, but we feel that this way of removing it is not human, that's why there are so many tragedies. "War will not make Iraq more free, it will do the opposite."

The suspicions of Saudi Shiites, many of whom have family ties across the border and a shared religious and cultural heritage, may shed light on the sentiments of southern Iraqis. But it also reflects the pent up frustrations toward their own government in Saudi Arabia.

In Iraq, Shiites make up about 60 per cent of the population but have long been dominated by the Sunni minority who back Saddam's regime. They have been subject to brutal repression in the south for decades, which is why some Western analysts were surprised by their reluctance to rise up again.

In Saudi Arabia, it's a different story. Shiites are only about 10 to 15 per cent of the population of 21 million, though they make up a majority in the strategically sensitive, oil-rich Eastern Province. Here, the restive Shiite population suffers from entrenched discrimination and religious intolerance, though their plight cannot be compared to that of the Iraqis.

The schism between the minority Shiite sect and the mainstream Sunni school of Islam goes back to a 1,400-year-old succession struggle in Iraq, which pitted Imam Ali and his son Hussein against the Caliphate. The climactic battles took place in Karbala, which became a pilgrimage site for Shiites.

Now, that city and its surroundings are shaping up as a battleground between American and Iraqi troops.

Al-Jazeera defends images,won't censor war horror

By Jim Wolf

DOHA, Qatar, March 30 (Reuters) - Blasted by Washington and London for beaming distressing pictures from Iraq, al-Jazeera television said on Sunday it would not censor the horrors of war.

"I think the audience has the right to see all aspects of the battle," said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for the Qatar-based Jazeera, seen by many as being a major influence in shaping Arab opinion over the U.S.-led war.

The 24-hour, Arabic-language, broadcaster deliberated carefully before beaming pictures that could be especially troublesome to viewers, he said, and denied any political bias.

"We're not catering for any specific side, or any specific idelology. What we are doing is our business as professionally as possible," Ballout added.

Images of bombed Baghdad buildings, bloodied and screaming Iraqi children and slain or captured U.S. and British troops seen by millions of viewers anger Washington and London which seek to portray the war as one to liberate Iraqis.

"If there's a perceived imbalance, it's purely a function of access," said Ballout

He said if the Americans and British gave the station more access to their troops, who invaded Iraq 11 days ago "you would certainly find as much coverage on the ground from there as you would find from the Iraqi side."

The station says it has at least 35 million viewers in the Arab world. In Europe, Ballout said, its subscriber figures doubled to eight million homes in the first week of the war. These came mainly in countries with large Muslim populations such as Britain and France.

The Pentagon initially offered Jazeera several opportunities to travel with U.S. combat units but only one of these "embed" offers worked out, he said.

The others fell through because of visa headaches from Bahrain, a base for allied warships, and Kuwait, launchpad for many journalists covering U.S. and British ground forces.

With many ordinary Arabs protesting angrily at the U.S.-led war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, authorities in some Arab states also object to Jazeera's conflict coverage.

The station has also drawn U.S. ire for its cover in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its broadcast messages from al Qaed leader Osama bin Laden and, more recently, for showing video footage of Iraqi interrogation of U.S. prisoners of war.

"NEGATIVE LIGHT"

"They tend to portray our efforts in a negative light," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview with National Public Radio broadcast last Wednesday.The same day, Powell appeared on Jazeera, as have other Bush administration officials to get their messages to Arab viewers.

Britain's military commander in the Gulf, Air Marshal Brian Burridge even suggested the station might have become a tool of Iraqi propaganda and violated the Geneva Conventions. The 1949 protocols bind states, not media organisations.Burridge slammed Jazeera for showing "shocking, close-up" pictures of two British troops later said by Prime Minister Tony Blair to have been executed by Iraqis.

"Quite apart from the obvious distress that such pictures cause friends and families of the personnel concerned, such disgraceful behaviour is a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention," Burridge told a briefing at U.S. Central Commnd's forward headquarters in Qatar last Thursday.

But Ballout, a 45-year-old former London-based journalist of Lebanese descent, dismisses such criticism as hypocritical and self-serving. He said other 24-hour news channels like the BBC and CNN had also used footage of Iraqi POWs, hands bounds and heads bowed, that could have upset viewers.

"We have covered similar incidents, similar conflicts, in Serbia, in Bosnia, in the (Israeli-) occupied territories and in Afghanistan, and nobody said a thing," he said.

"It just strikes me a little bit funny that all the outcrying is taking place" now.

New York Times Editorial defends Al Jazeera

Editorial - Why Al Jazeera Matters
New York Times March 30, 2003

In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Persian Gulf war, state-run media in the Arab world suppressed the news for three days. Today, word of such an attack would be out within minutes because of a television station called Al Jazeera. Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar, the gulf state where our war operations are based, Al Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world, watched by 35 million people. That is why the decision by the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to bar the station's reporters is so repugnant.

The exchanges' complaint against Al Jazeera is that it is not "responsible." This is a cryptic allegation but it seems linked to the television station's decision last Sunday to show images of dead American and British soldiers as well as P.O.W.'s in Iraq. But Al Jazeera says that after the Pentagon asked it to remove the pictures until families had been notified it did so for eight hours, while the television stations of numerous countries continued to show them.

In truth, it seems that New York's exchanges have a broader complaint, heard in various forms elsewhere — that Al Jazeera is insufficiently supportive of America and its war in Iraq. As the only uncensored Arabic television in the world, Al Jazeera does indeed slant its debates and discussions in a way that can be hostile to the West. It is not Fox News. But if our hope for the Arab world is, as the Bush administration never ceases to remind us, for it to enjoy a free, democratic life, Al Jazeera is the kind of television station we should encourage.

It is the only Arabic television station that regularly interviews Israeli officials. It is also an important forum for American officials. Last week alone, it interviewed three senior members of the American government, including Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Al Jazeera has also been a vital source of information about Al Qaeda. Its reporters have had access to Qaeda leaders, and tapes of Osama bin Laden have found their way to the station's offices. This has been a useful window on a world that for too long has been utterly alien to us.

The ban on Al Jazeera by the princes of the free market puts them in impressive company. Libya and Tunisia have both complained that Al Jazeera gives too much airtime to opposition leaders. Jordan has thrown it out. Kuwait refused visas to its correspondents who were to be placed with American forces based there.

If a free, uncensored press ever arrives in the Arab world, many Americans will be shocked by what it says. Then, the energetic if somewhat tendentious broadcasts of Al Jazeera will seem, in comparison, like the nuanced objectivity of the BBC. For right now, Al Jazeera deserves all the help and support it can get.

Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war

My station is a threat to American media control - and they know it
Al-Jazeera views this war as an illegal enterprise
Faisal Bodi
( Faisal Bodi is a senior editor for aljazeera.net )
Friday March 28, 2003
The Guardian

Last month, when it became clear that the US-led drive to war was irreversible, I - like many other British journalists - relocated to Qatar for a ringside seat. But I am an Islamist journalist, so while the others bedded down at the £1m media centre at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I found a more humble berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm of al-Jazeera.
And yet, only a week into the war, I find myself working for the most sought-after news resource in the world. On March 23, the night the channel screened the first footage of captured US PoW's, al-Jazeera was the most searched item on the internet portal, Lycos, registering three times as many hits as the next item.

I do not mean to brag - people are turning to us simply because the western media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a 15-minute drive from central command, the view of events from here could not be more different. Of all the major global networks, al-Jazeera has been alone in proceeding from the premise that this war should be viewed as an illegal enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants and the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has provided a corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring occasional resistance, going to plan.

Last Tuesday, while western channels were celebrating a Basra "uprising" which none of them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in the city, our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat verdict of "uneventful" - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as saviours.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Earlier in the week Arab viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the coalition bombing of "Ansar al-Islam" positions in the north-east of the country. All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled by a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the western media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm Qasr was under "coalition" control - it was not until Wednesday that al-Jazeera could confirm all resistance there had been pacified.

Throughout the past week, armed peoples in the west and south have been attacking the exposed rearguard of coalition positions, while all the time - despite debilitating sandstorms - western TV audiences have seen litte except their steady advance towards Baghdad. This is not truthful reporting.

There is also a marked difference when reporting the anger the invasion has unleashed on the Muslim street. The view from here is that any vestige of goodwill towards the US has evaporated with this latest aggression, and that Britain has now joined the US and Israel as a target of this rage.

The British media has condemned al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of Iraqi soliders either dead or captured and humiliated.

Amid the battle for hearts and minds in the most information-controlled war in history, one measure of the importance of those American PoW pictures and the images of the dead British soldiers is surely the sustained "shock and awe" hacking campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the war.

As I write, the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. Meanwhile, our hosting company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our contract after lobbying by other clients whose websites have been brought down by the hacking.

It's too early for me to say when, or indeed if, I will return to my homeland. So far this war has progressed according to a near worst-case scenario. Iraqis have not turned against their tormentor. The southern Shia regard the invasion force as the greater Satan. Opposition in surrounding countries is shaking their regimes. I fear there remains much work to be done.

On a stretch of Iraqi highway, an improvised grave

UMM QASR, Iraq (AFP) Mar 31, 2003

Eight Iraqis stand weeping unconsolably next to an empty coffin and a hastily dug grave on the side of the highway leading from Umm Qasr to Basra.

Inside the shallow hole, limbs askew, lies the decomposing body of Bassem Abdu Zara, killed by British troops last week as he and some friends were trying to flee the fighting that had engulfed southern Iraq.

"What fault did my poor son have?" sobs his elderly father, sitting impotent by the side of the road.

On the third day of the war, Bassem and 10 other people were heading north from there homes in Umm Qasr toward Basra, 55 kilometres (34 miles) away, thinking it would be safer up there.Hassem Farah, one of the survivors, recalls: "British soldiers fired on us. First against the car and then, after we all got out with our hands up, they continued attacking us with machine guns."

The van exploded and caught fire. It was completely gutted.Farah, who was wounded in the leg, was limping as he returned to the scene Sunday to help recover the body of his friend.He said that, beside Bassem, the driver of the van was mortally wounded. He died several hours later in hospital in Umm Qasr where other wounded among the group, including a 10-year-old girl, are being treated.

Alongside the van are the remains of a truck, also burnt out.Inside are the skeletons of two people, who witnesses say were machine gunned before their vehicle exploded. In Umm Qasr, no one seemed to know who they were, and no one had come to reclaim their bodies.With no chance to hold a funeral in the middle of the fighting, Bassem's friends buried him where he was killed.

As relatives and others gathered to transfer Bassem's remains into the coffin, a number of cars stopped on the road, their drivers curious to know what was happening. They were quickly waved on for fear of another attack.

A short while afterwards, a British armored car arrives and a soldier gets out, demanding to know what these people are hiding in the hole. When he sees the answer, he somberly withdraws, his head hanging."It's obvious they weren't soldiers," the Iraqis say. "Why did they kill them?"

They were digging as they spoke, first with shovels and then with their hands. As their work proceeded, the stench became overpowering, and they had to put perfume under their noses and cover their faces to keep from vomiting.

Finally, the body appears, unrecognizable, and his friends retrieve it with the help of ropes. The men kneel and weep. A child sitting inside the vehicle that brought them watches on impassively.

"This country didn't need this war; we were better without them," one of the men says as Bassem's body is wrapped in plastic and placed in the wooden coffin, which is hoisted on to the roof of the car.

"He was 30 years old. He only got married four months ago. We were all so happy," his father says, wiping the tears from his eyes as he leaves

Iraqis relearn old means of communication after bombing knocks out phones

BAGHDAD (AFP) Mar 31, 2003

Ahmad Qassem won't really have a day off this week. His day-trip home will be consumed by no less than 15 visits to relay greetings from colleagues cut off from their families by US bombings that have severed telephone lines.

"I keep receiving requests by colleagues to contact their families. Up until now I've been asked by 15 of them, and more seem to be coming," said the 36-year-old as he waited at the Al-Alawi station for the bus to the southern city of Babylon."This is definitely ruining my day off. Instead of spending quiet time with my family, I will have to make visits to 15 neighbors," Qassem said.

A week and a half of massive US and British air strikes have targetted a number of communication centers around Iraq, including at least seven in the capital, cutting off hundreds of thousands of telephone lines.

Each center services about 25,000 homes.International lines have been totally knocked out. Most local lines have been damaged, with many areas suffering complete cuts. In Baghdad, telephone calls can now only be made within a district.

"I can only call my neighbors, but why would I need to do that when I can call them from out my window?" joked Faleh Salim, a grocer on central Saadoun Street."What we need after nights of massive criminal bombings is to speak to our family members in other parts of Baghdad or to anxious relatives in other provinces," he said.

Most people have to drive -- or failing that, to bike -- to spread news to their families or conduct business.

"I sent my family a letter, but they didn't believe the messenger, so I had to go and show them that I was actually safe," said Ali Ahmad, a taxi driver.

The attacks on telecommunication centers are part of the US strategy to "tighten the noose" on the regime in the war aimed at toppling President Saddam Hussein.

But effectively, it is Iraqi civilians who are hit where it hurts most.

"I can't call my family, which must be very worried, and I can't call or fax my business partner in the northern city of Mosul to know what to do with some transactions," said Abu Kamal, who owns a clothing store on Saadoun."I resorted to my grandfather's way of doing business: I sent my partner a letter two days ago. Can you imagine?"

Most Iraqis used to picking up a phone now have to resort to the old-fashioned way of communicating.

The Hafiz al-Qadi parking lot in central Baghdad from where Iraqis drive to Syria and Jordan -- the only two countries they can cross to -- is full. Not full of vehicles, but of people with letters in their hands.

"They are waiting for cars to venture on the dangerous journeys to Damascus or Amman to ask the drivers to carry their letters," explained Ismail al-Kurdi, who runs a small transportation business on the premises."It takes about 12 hours of driving, often under bombing raids," he said.

A message left to one driver reads: "My dearest daughter Nur ... I am sending you this letter with dear brother Sabri, the driver kindly taking this letter to Amman" at a charge of about five dollars.

Sabri said the man "hadn't been able to call his family for weeks, but said he was not worried because 'God will keep Iraqis safe.'"

Badih Shaloub, 43, paced nervously, holding a small folded piece of paper in his clenched fist."I am waiting for a car to leave because I need to find my family. I've lost contact with my wife and my 12-year-old daughter Nawras," he said.

Abu Nawras, as he likes being called, has two numbers on the hand-written page: one in Dubai and the other in Damascus."We lived in Yemen, but my wife didn't want to stay there. So I'm guessing they are at some relatives in either Dubai or Damascus by now," he said."I don't know where they are because I left in a hurry when the war broke out. I wanted to come here to carry arms and defend our neighborhood," he said proudly.

Hometown America watches in horror

The Pentagon told them war would be swift and painless. Now the truth is invading their living rooms and the grim images are of people they love

by Ed Helmore
Sunday March 30, 2003 The Observer

Claude Johnson was flicking through TV channels to find cartoons for his granddaughter when a news bulletin mentioned that his daughter Shoshana had been captured by the Iraqis. 'I heard her name but I wasn't sure. Then I got on the internet,' he said. Six hours later, a US military official called to confirm that she was indeed now a prisoner of war.

Soon after that, the Iraqis broadcast footage of Johnson and four other members of the US Army's 507th Maintenance Company captured with her, looking terrified, confused and in some cases injured. That helped bring home to the American public the lesson they have been learning painfully over the past few days: the conflict will not be nearly as quick, straightforward or light on US casualties as Pentagon planners originally believed.

Johnson, a cook, was stationed at Fort Bliss, a sprawling military base of the outskirts of El Paso in Texas, George W. Bush's home state, near the Mexican border.

For many Americans this huge military facility has come to encapsulate the repercussions of going to war. In a single incident last weekend half a company of cooks, welders, drivers and mechanics that took a wrong turn near the city of Nasiriyah, blundered into a firefight and were lost.

Johnson, a 30-year-old single mother with a two-year-old daughter, Janelle, had not even been trained for combat her father said: 'She can defend a perimeter or something like that, but her primary mission is to cook for the company. She can cook anything - chicken enchiladas, cakes. Why was she so close to a firefight?' She was taken during an Iraqi attack on coalition supply lines, a tactic the Americans had not anticipated.

Last week Pentagon officials said that two 507th Maintenance Company personnel are dead, eight missing presumed dead, four wounded and five others taken prisoner. In addition, two Apache helicopter pilots have been captured and 12 Marines are listed as missing in action.

Pictures of a petrified-looking Johnson have revived fears over the fate of personnel captured in previous conflicts. There is also growing concern about the fate of two other missing women from the 507th, privates Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa, after reports that two uniforms belonging to female soldiers had been found in a hospital in Nasiriyah, apparently with the dog tags and US flags torn from them. Debate rages about the proper place of the 200,000 females in the American military.

The fate of the members of the 507th in the face of Iraqi resistance has caused a shift in public opinion of the war towards realism: 70 per cent of Americans now believe it could go on for months. Shocking film of dead soldiers, broadcast by al-Jazeera and in sanitised form by US networks, has contributed. Some appeared to have been shot in the head, prompting Pentagon claims that up to seven troops had been executed.

The focus on the PoWs has also given the public a clearer picture of who the troops in the Gulf are. Johnson joined up to learn to cook, Piestewa is a Native American from a Navajo reservation, and captured welder Private Patrick Miller, who told his captors on TV that he was only in Iraq to 'fix broke stuff', enlisted last summer to help pay student loans - all of which has fuelled criticism that the military is weighted towards minorities and poor whites.

Questions are also being asked about Sergeant Asan Akbar, the Marine who last Sunday night turned on his fellow soldiers in Kuwait, throwing grenades into tents where his colleagues slept, killing a captain instantly and injuring 15 other members of the 101st Airborne Division, one of whom later died. He is now in a military jail in Germany, set to be charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Eugene Fidell, a Washington lawyer, said the crime could warrant the death penalty.

Military criminal investigators have said that the 36-year-old, a member of a mine-clearing battalion, had an 'attitude problem' and had been reprimanded for insubordination and told he would not be joining his unit's push into Iraq. But the fact that he shouted 'You're here to kill our mothers and daughters!' when he was captured, and his Muslim faith, have prompted his family to deny that he is a terrorist.

His stepfather and younger brother, Ishmael Mustafa Bilal, who live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, maintain he cracked under the pressure not so much of being in the Gulf but of being an African-American and a Muslim in the US Army in the wake of 11 September. Bilal says that is more than just a theory. He was the only Muslim in his squadron, but recently left the Air Force with an honourable discharge, with the help of his Congressman, after citing the same pressure.

Akbar was not allowed to take part in the first Gulf War because of his religion, said his mother, Quran Bilal. 'He said "Mama, when I get there I have the feeling they are going to arrest me just because of my name",' she said. 'He wouldn't try to take nobody's life. He said the only thing he was going to do was blow up the bridges.'

The War in Iraq Turns Ugly. That's What Wars Do.

By JAMES WEBB
March 30, 2003 New York Times

This campaign was begun, like so many others throughout history, with lofty exhortations from battlefield commanders to their troops, urging courage, patience, compassion for the Iraqi people and even chivalry. Within a week it had degenerated into an unexpected ugliness in virtually every populated area where American and British forces have come under fire. Those who believed from intelligence reports and Pentagon war planners that the Iraqi people, and particularly those from the Shiite sections of the southeast, would rise up to greet them as liberators were instead faced with persistent resistance.

Near Basra, as The Financial Times reported, "soldiers were not being welcomed as liberators but often confronted with hatred." In the increasingly messy fights around Nasiriya, Marine units, which earlier were ambushed while responding to what appeared to be a large-scale surrender, had by the end of the week destroyed more than 200 homes.

Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. Snippets of news from Nasiriya give us a picture of chaotic guerrilla warfare, replete with hit-and-run ambushes, dead civilians, friendly fire casualties from firefights begun in the dead of night and a puzzling number of marines who are still unaccounted for. And long experience tells us that this sort of combat brings with it a "downstream" payback of animosity and revenge.

Other reports corroborate the direction that the war, as well as its aftermath, promises to take: Iraqi militiamen, in civilian clothes, firing weapons and disappearing inside the anonymity of the local populace. So-called civilians riding in buses to move toward contact. Enemy combatants mixing among women and children. Children firing weapons. Families threatened with death if a soldier does not fight. A wounded American soldier commenting, "If they're dressed as civilians, you don't know who is the enemy anymore."

These actions, while reprehensible, are nothing more than classic guerrilla warfare, no different in fact or in moral degree from what our troops faced in difficult areas of Vietnam. In the Fifth Marine Regiment area of operations outside Da Nang, we routinely faced enemy soldiers dressed in civilian clothes and even as women. Their normal routes of ingress and egress were through villages, and we fought daily in populated areas. On one occasion a smiling, waving girl — no more than 7 years old — lured a squad from my platoon into a vicious North Vietnamese crossfire. And if a Vietcong soldier surrendered, it was essential to remove his family members from their village by nightfall, or they might be killed for the sake of discipline.

The moral and tactical confusion that surrounds this type of warfare is enormous. It is also one reason that the Marine Corps took such heavy casualties in Vietnam, losing five times as many killed as in World War I, three times as many as in Korea and more total casualties than in World War II. Guerrilla resistance has already proved deadly in the Iraq war, and far more effective than the set-piece battles that thus far have taken place closer to Baghdad. A majority of American casualties at this point have been the result of guerrilla actions against Marine and Army forces in and around Nasiriya. As this form of warfare has unfolded, the real surprise is why anyone should have been surprised at all. But people have been, among them many who planned the war, many who are fighting it and a large percentage of the general population.

Why?

Partly because of Iraq's poor performance in the 1991 gulf war, which caused many to underestimate Iraqi willingness to fight, while overlooking the distinction between retreating from conquered territory and defending one's native soil. And partly because protection of civilians has become such an important part of military training. But mostly, because the notion of fierce resistance cut against the grain of how this war was justified to the American people.

The strategies of both Iraq and the United States are only partly, some would say secondarily, military. The key strategic prize for American planners has always been the acceptance by Iraq's people of an invasion intended to change their government. If the Iraqis welcomed us, the logic goes, it would be difficult for those on the Arab street, as well as Americans and others who questioned the wisdom of the war, to condemn our presence.

Thus, throughout the buildup to war, the Iraqis were characterized to America — and to our military — as so brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein's regime that they would quickly rise up to overthrow him when the Americans arrived. This was clearly the expectation of many American fighting men as they crossed into Iraq.

"Their determination was really a surprise to us all," said Brig. Gen. John Kelly of the Marines on Friday. "What we were really hoping for was just to go through and everyone would wave flags and all that."

On the other side, the Iraqi regime has used both its ancient history and American support of Israel in appealing to the nationalism of its people to resist an invasion by an outside power. It is as yet unclear which argument is succeeding, although early indications are that the American invasion has stirred up enormous animosity.

The initial bombing campaign was political, aimed at Iraqi leaders. The current effort appears to be increasingly strategic, designed to damage the Iraqi military's better units. After that, the next step is likely to be a series of conventional engagements matching American armored and infantry forces against Iraq's Republican Guard. The United States hopes to force Iraq into fixed-position warfare or even to draw them into a wild attack, where American technological superiority and air power might destroy Iraq's best fighting force.

But Iraq's leaders have reviewed their mistakes in the first gulf war and have also studied the American efforts in Somalia and Kosovo. They will most likely try to draw American units into closer quarters, forcing them to fight even armored battles in heavily populated areas nearer to Baghdad. This kind of fighting would be designed to drive up American casualties beyond the point of acceptability at home, and also to harden Iraqi resolve against the invaders.

If American forces are successful in these engagements, the war may be over sooner rather than later. But if these battles stagnate, guerrilla warfare could well become pandemic, not only in Baghdad but also across Iraq. And even considering the strong likelihood of an allied victory, it is hard to imagine an end point without an extremely difficult period of occupation.

In fact, what will be called an occupation may well end up looking like the images we have seen in places like Nasiriya. Do Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein's regime more deeply than they dislike the Americans who are invading their country? That question will still be with this administration, and the military forces inside Iraq, when the occupation begins, whether the war lasts a few more days or several more months.

Or worse, the early stages of an occupation could see acts of retribution against members of Saddam Hussein's regime, then quickly turn into yet another round of guerrilla warfare against American forces. This point was made chillingly clear a few days ago by the leader of Iraq's major Shiite opposition group, who, according to Reuters, promised armed resistance if the United States remains in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is overthrown.

Welcome to hell.

Many of us lived it in another era. And don't expect it to get any better for a while.

James Webb, secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, was a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam. He is an author and filmmaker.