Something else I've just noticed - not once have I seen any kind of map showing which parts of Iraq are under coalition control.

I know this war's supposedly about driving on Baghdad, Basra et al, but the only way to fight a war safely is to take and hold land behind your initial strike wedge, so there should be regions utterly free of Saddam's influence. If we're striking so deep into Iraq that there's fighting less than a hundred miles from Baghdad, we should have conquered the entire southern region, to secure the supply lines necessary to maintain a siege.

Yet we're hearing that convoys behind our lines are under attack daily, prisoners being taken, soldiers being killed. Even though thousands of Iraqi regular soldiers have surrendered, there's still fighting with irregular guerilla Saddam loyalists in virtually every major town.

There's just been a comparison made by a BBC reporter, quoting a British commander, saying that the situation could become another Northern Ireland, with paramilitary snipers hitting soldiers wherever they want to.

Thought For The Day: Goddammit, the frontal silhouette of a helicopter gunship is fucking scary... Was it deliberate to make it look like some kind of insect? Or is the fear just a result of its well-deserved reputation for being one of the most fucking lethal engines of war ever invented?