UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: SO, WEAPONS THIS IS OF VICTORY MASS DECEPTION
mountable, under the present circumstances.
Was this even a war?
THE ever skeptical Mick Hume of Spiked On-line
asks, “Was there a war at all? There were certainly
plenty of bombs dropped, guns fired and
Iraqis killed by the American and British forces.
But there has not been one single clash with
Iraqi forces that could remotely be described as
a battle. Compared to the major wars of the past,
the entire campaign adds up to little more than
an extended skirmish. The Big Battle to Come
was always the one just around the corner – in
Basra, or Baghdad, or Tikrit – that somehow
never quite came.
“The ‘surprisingly stiff resistance’ that coalition
forces claimed to be facing from a few irregulars
at various times over the past three weeks
has been largely a product of their own anxious
imagination. By the time of the first armored raid
into Baghdad last weekend, the coalition seemed
to be wildly exaggerating the scale of Iraqi military
casualties, almost as if to prove that there
really had been a proper fight. ‘One thousand’
killed in a three-hour shooting trip along a
Baghdad boulevard quickly became ‘two thousand’
or more. Who was counting?
“But then, remember, this was supposed to be
a war against a dictator who held the world to
ransom, a regime the like of which, according to
the Pentagon only last week, ‘the world has not
ever seen before.’ Having launched a war on the
risible basis that Saddam the tin-pot dictator was
a bigger monster than Stalin and Hitler, they
could hardly afford to admit that he had turned
out to be a pantomime villain with a cardboard
army . . .”
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An Iraqi voice
SOMEONE forwarded a letter to me from an
Iraqi woman named Yasmin who says that her
country now has to pick up the pieces, as TV
News celebrates the great victory. She writes: “In
Basra, I saw kids throwing rocks on soldiers and
tanks . . . does it bring any memories to your
mind?
“Palestine, perhaps? So . . . no dancing . . . no
flowers!
“The hospitals are suffering severe shortages
in medical supplies, and doctors have also complained,
of not having clean water, to wash their
hands before handling the patients . . . ”
Exploding ordnance
ESSAM AL-GHALIB, Arab News War Correspondent,
reports that unexploded ordnance litters
the landscape: “Six days after the “liberation” of
Najaf, Iraqis of all ages continue to pack the corridors
of Saddam Hussein General Hospital.
They are mostly victims of unexploded munitions
that are strewn throughout various residential
neighborhoods, along streets, in family
homes, in school playgrounds, in the fields
belonging to farms . . .
“U.S. forces have been using cluster bombs
against Iraqi soldiers, but the majority of the victims
are civilians, mostly children curious about
the small shiny objects which are the same size
as a child’s hand. Cluster bombs have been
dropped by the hundreds, explained an administrator
at the hospital.” They are supposed to
explode on impact. However, many do not, and
lie on the street exposed to the elements.
“A young Iraqi in Najaf told Arab News yester-