War and Peace: Anarchy in the Streets
In the NY Times

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was understandably defensive but stunningly off message yesterday when he claimed: “Freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to commit mistakes, and to commit crimes.” That was not the vision of freedom the Bush administration was selling when it began this enterprise, and it is not necessarily one the Iraqi people would welcome…
But there is no alternative for the American military other than to restore order. It must police the streets, and above all make Iraq safe enough for humanitarian aid workers to bring in food, water and medical supplies, and it must work to restore electrical and water utilities. The military, which has performed so brilliantly during the war, is going to have to take up this second, and perhaps harder, challenge. This is not only its obligation under international conventions, but also a necessary step in the dismantling of Mr. Hussein’s reign of terror.

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Kill The Messenger
David Miller provides a nice collection of eleven articles detailing the events of yesterday’s attack on hotels that the U.S. knew contained members of the independent press (read: “non-embedded”).
This goes very nicely with his earlier posting: The Embedded Press vs. Freelance Press.

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WMD=Weapons of Mass Destruction
I may look silly putting that up there, but I don’t like using acronyms without explaining them first…
Now that we all know what “WMD” means, this article, much like the article I posted earlier would suggest that there may not be any of them to be found in Iraq.
Iraqi Weapons Might Be Hard to Find
Suspicious Sites Provide No Proof Yet
By Barton Gellman for the Washington Post .

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Well at least this only took weeks and not months or years. Let’s hope the U.S. will be making similar admissions soon…
Britain Admits There May Be No WMD’s in Iraq
By Ruben Bannerjee for Al Jazeera.

Making the startling confession in a radio interview, British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, added in the same breath that he would in any case rejoice the “fall” of Saddam Hussein and his regime — regardless of whether any weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq or not.
The confession reconfirms the worst fears of opponents of the war that “weapons of mass destruction” is only a ruse for the US and the British to go to war against Iraq.
At the very least the admission certainly deals a serious blow to the moral legitimacy that the US and the British have been seeking in prosecuting the war…
UN weapons inspectors, who scoured the country for several months until the US asked them to leave last month, had repeatedly certified that they had found no credible evidence of Iraq possessing any weapons of mass destruction.

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Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians
From the Canadian Press.

Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw “incredible” levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad.
Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad.
“There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla,” Huguenin said in a interview by satellite telephone.
“We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening.”
Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village of Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy fighting between American troops and Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the result of “bombs, projectiles.”
“At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at that place . . . but it was definitely a different pattern from what we had seen in Basra or Baghdad.
“There will be investigations I am sure.”
Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the flow of wounded, said Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100 wounded a day.
Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered superficial shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he said.
But the pattern in Hilla was completely different.
“In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror.”
At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two days, he said — far beyond its capacity.
“Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had to manage, that was all.”
The city is no longer accessible, he added…
The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling for donations to help cope. The Red Cross Web site is: www.redcross.ca

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That’ll teach em for thinking.
UK troops sent home for questioning war

The soldiers were returned to Britain on the eve of the war when they expressed concerns the offensive was in breach of the United Nations charter and it might be illegal for them to follow certain orders, their lawyer Gilbert Blades said.
“They expressed doubts about the legality of the war, about whether they should be called upon to shoot innocent civilians,” Blades, a Lincolnshire-based military lawyer, told Reuters. “As soon as they expressed these views to other soldiers they were then removed.”

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