By: Jim Wolf  

The United States is prepared to pay a "very high price" in terms of casualties to capture Baghdad and oust President Saddam Hussein, a senior U.S. Central Command official said on Monday.

"We're prepared to pay a very high price because we are not going to do anything other than ensure that this regime goes away", the official told reporters, adding that U.S. casualties in the 12-day-old war had so far been "fairly" light.

"If that means there will be a lot of casualties, then there will be a lot of casualties", said the official, who spoke on condition that he not be named.

"The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy. I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him."

- Marine Corporal Ryan Dupre, near a bridge in Nasiriya, Iraq

From:  

British soldiers injured when a U.S. "tankbuster" aircraft attacked their convoy, killing one of their comrades, hit out angrily at the "cowboy" pilot today. Troops wounded in Friday's attack accused the A-10 Thunderbolt pilot of "incompetence and negligence" while others privately called for a manslaughter prosecution.

The comments came as America's most senior military official vowed to make it his quest to stop future "friendly fire" tragedies.

By: Jimmy Breslin  

Blood from a bombed baby in Baghdad goes over the wide choking sands and it crosses mountains and then great land masses and then suddenly, over a channel, it is in Westminster, in London, and people look at the sidewalk and wonder where these large blood spots came from, and the officer on duty in front of 10 Downing Street looks at the door handle and worries, how did this get here without me seeing this and having it cleaned? He has a servant rush to the door with cloth and polish and he wipes the blood and polishes the door handles and then walks off and the guard happens to glance at the door handle and the blood is back, smeared bright new red over the polished handle.

The baby's blood is off to rush over the ocean, a strange red cloud poised to rain and it floats over the green of the Washington parks and goes down a sloping street to the State Department, where as a man opens a car door for Colin Powell he suddenly notices blood on the door handle and he quickly unfurls a handkerchief and wipes the handle and Powell gets in and the car goes off and the man who held the door is left in the driveway and he sees the red that is still on Powell's door handle.

By: Carol Norris  

Just before war broke out George Bush spoke to the world and said: "War has no certainty except the certainty of sacrifice." Coming from a man of extraordinary privilege who has never felt the ravages of war, these words rang hollow. The only thing that quieted the ringing of his words was the roar of his subtext.

We know there are certain things we have to sacrifice. We're okay with that. It's part of life. But we ask you, Mr. Bush, Mr. Frist, Carlyle Group members, and all you especially well-connected corporate folks as you sit high atop your Mother of All Bombs, toasting your good fortune and surveying the sweeping, almost inconceivable changes you've made to our world and its peoples in the relatively very short time of your administration; as you look out over the world that, except for a privileged few, is being destabilized, shocked and awed, "disciplined", bribed, deleted from the record, bombed, made irrelevant, ignored, alienated, starved, walked away from, underfunded, fractionalized, devalued both literally and figuratively, bullied, poisoned, silenced, marginalized, and depleted to smithereens by your policies and actions, what is there left to sacrifice after this?

Potential Conflicts Abound for Independent Panel on 9/11 Attacks

By: Laurence Arnold  

Members of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks have numerous professional ties to industries and organizations that could come under their scrutiny, financial disclosure reports show.

The affiliations create possible conflicts that could pose challenges for the panel as it deals with a broad mandate, a tight schedule, and limited funding.

At least three of the 10 commissioners serve as directors of international financial or consulting firms, five work for law firms that represent airlines, and three have ties to the U.S. military or defense contractors, according to personal financial disclosures they were required to submit.

By: punpirate  

How times change. For a White House with a self-created reputation for toughness, there has been a notable brittleness and sensitivity to criticism in the Bush ranks. This tendency has been apparent ever since the inauguration (beginning with Bush's eschewing of the traditional half-mile walk to the White House after inauguration - the occasional egg pelting the Presidential limousine may have figured into that impromptu decision), but it is in full bloom as the war against Iraq unfolds.

Most recently, the remarks of Paul Celucci, the ambassador to Canada, are most instructive in this regard. Sent to a meeting of Canadian businessmen (the Bush White House is always more comfortable in the company of businessmen), Celucci excoriated the Chretien government for its position on the U.S.-Iraq war (let us please call it what it actually is), and, curiously, called on Chretien to "muzzle" the Canadian press.

That latter remark reveals a wondrous tapestry of truth about how the Bush crew thinks and operates...

By: Doris "Granny D" Haddock  

Many of us worked hard for a peaceful way forward in Iraq. But one man, who became President by a quirk of the Electoral College and supported by a few other quirks on the Supreme Court, has a different view and has taken us down a most radical road. The idea of an unprovoked attack - when it was being handled peacefully - is the most radically perverse thing America has done in my long life. And I shudder to think that it is only one thing among many radical things done during this dark presidency. The holding of people without charges, without lawyers - that is shameful and a violation of any oath made to uphold the Constitution. Would it have really been an extra risk to honor the Constitution? Is it not a greater risk to discard it? And since when do we not have the courage of our Constitution? Since when are we not ready to die for our freedoms?

It is a dark time, but it is no coup. This is not the end of American democracy or the beginning of some fascist regime. We are too big, we are too willful and brave a people for that to ever be so, though there is great cause for worry.

By: Maureen Dowd  

We're shocked that the enemy forces don't observe the rules of war. We're shocked that it's hard to tell civilians from combatants, and friends from foes. Adversaries use guerrilla tactics; they are irregulars; they take advantage of the hostile local weather and terrain; they refuse to stay in uniform. Golly, as our 'Secretary of War' likes to say, it's unfair.

Some of their soldiers are mere children. We know we have overwhelming, superior power, yet we can't use it all. We're stunned to discover that the local population treats our well-armed high-tech troops like invaders.

Why is all this a surprise again? I know our hawks avoided serving in Vietnam, but didn't they, like, read about it?

By: Bernard Weiner  

The policy behind the Iraq war comes mainly from chickenhawks - ie: armchair soldiers who made sure they didn't have to serve in Vietnam or any other wars. These Project for the New American Century ideologues were certain that the Iraqis would welcome the U.S. soldiers as liberators, they knew how weak Saddam's regime was, they were sure they could roll the members of the U.N. Security Council into backing their fait accompli war, they knew Turkey would accept the bribe and come around, they knew everything.

Infallible.

Bush, not having any ideas of his own, was a prime candidate for swallowing such malarky and turning it into doctrine. And so, against the advice of everyone who should count in such things - former President Bush and his top security advisors; his own military brass; the Pope and other world religious leaders; his European allies; the Arab World, virtually unanimously; ten million citizens of various countries who took to the streets to denounce the planned invasion, and so on - Bush launched a "pre-emptive" war on Iraq, absent any provocation.

By: R. Watson, T. Reid, and M. Evans  

Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, accused Syria of arming President Saddam Hussein. He said the shipments, including nightvision goggles, were a direct threat to U.S. and British forces and he added that Washington would hold Damascus accountable for "hostile acts" if the traffic continued.

Mr Rumsfeld said the movement of military supplies, equipment, and people across the Syrian border "vastly complicates our situation". Asked if he was threatening Damascus with military action, he replied: "I'm saying exactly what I'm saying. It was carefully phrased."

Mr Rumsfeld also said that hundreds of revolutionaries of the Badr Corps, who are trained, equipped and directed by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard, were operating inside Iraq. He said American forces would be forced to treat them as enemy "combatants" and the Iranian Government would be held responsible for their actions.

"'F[uck] Saddam. We're taking him out.' Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase."

- from an article in the Mar. 31, 2003 Issue of Time magazine

By: Molly Ivins  

Think about it. We're supposedly fighting a war to bring democracy to Iraq, and we threaten one of our strongest democratic allies with a potential military coup? Is this nuts, or what?

A decent respect for the opinions of mankind seems to have escaped many of us lately. A pop-eyed reporter on the FOX network, assigned to watch the war on Arab television, said: "They are reporting it completely differently. They are reporting this as an unprovoked war of aggression to gain control of the Iraqi oilfields and dominate the Middle East." Just like when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and we headed a worldwide coalition to repeal that invasion. Gee, I wonder where people in that region could have gotten the impression that we don't give a rat's behind about democracy?

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