There was ~nothing~ on the one o'clock news today about the 'chemical weapons factory'.

Starting to feel more sceptical than I was. Sounds as if it could be that the Pentagon said, 'Fuck, we're taking casualties left, right and centre, and we've nothing to show for it.'



Serves Bush right for not claiming a moral right to war, and instead pissing about with 'threats to security'. A morally-driven war might have got more allies than just Tony Blair, and the Spanish and Bulgarian governments.

I reckon that's why Blair's on board - judging from his past record (Sierra Leone and Kosovo), he's fully willing to go to war from a moral standpoint, fuck the legality and immediate threats (or lack thereof), whereas what Bush seems to have been concentrating on is getting the American people behind him by manufacturing (or exagerrating) the threat posed by Saddam.

And they failed at that as well.

'Look! Terrorists in Iraq!'

'Where?'

'Don't question the president, that's seditious and unpatriotic, you filthy traitor!'

Pretty telling, really, of the danger of having an administration that is utterly contemptuous of anyone not born within the borders of the USA. They honestly believe that winning over their own people is more important than convincing the governments of the rest of the world.



Also realised that I haven't heard a single concrete number regarding the deaths of Iraqi soldiers. Fair enough, most of the civilian death figures are going to be inflated because they're almost all behind Iraqi lines, but surely we should know how many soldiers we've killed? We're the ones who are picking up most of the bodies.

Why is our media not giving a number of how many they've seen?

The closest we got was the fighting in [damn these Arabic placenames, I can never remember them - where the Royal Marines were besieging the local police station/Ba'ath headquarters yesterday - Um Qasr, or is that a type of soft drink?]. The BBC said 120 Saddam loyalists were in the building.

The Americans (who only seemed to have a small presence in the battle, judging by the camera shots) called in an A-10 Warthog, and then the British launched a night time attack (pictured dramatically through night vision BBC cameras) in which three soldiers were burned, one seriously, and the assault team 'shot the men inside'.

From that, we can only infer 120 dead, unless prisoners were taken, for no friendly casualties. The building was on fire, so I suppose most of the casualties could have been from that. Only a few, if any, Iraqis would have escaped - night vision equipment makes 'under cover of darkness' a bit obsolete, even with the glare from a burning building, and no doubt the building was surrounded.

But still, no numbers on enemy dead.



Oh well, the only option's to keep going.

'Stop the war now!'

'How?'

'Pull out our troops! Stop the war now!'

'And let Saddam launch reprisals against the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who welcomed coalition troops? Make the deaths of the hundreds/thousands of Iraqi and dozens of coalition troops worthless? Make the deaths of all those civilians utterly pointless? And don't forget that we'll be legally bound to release all our POWs, and they've now got to go home and face charges of desertion if they're lucky.'

'Er... Stop the war now?'

It's fine to be a pacifist, just don't get so wrapped up in idealism that you go even further from reality than George W Bush and live in a fantasy world where Saddam won't kill tens of thousands of people in retaliation for their treason and in order to eliminate threats to his regime. Some people, the world is better without.

Yes, Bush might be one of them. But so is Saddam, and I think Saddam's the worst threat (maybe not to us, but to his own people, and therefore his little slice of the world and humanity). At least Bush can get voted out of office. Saddam eventually dies of old age, and you get Qusay Hussein or maybe a bloody transition with one of several other candidates (Uday's the eldest son, for a start).