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{ indy irl warblog } 31.03.03 national |
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news report
 Monday March 31, 2003 15:40 by warblogger
 Feel free to add your own links and representative portions of news stories you find on the net.... British soldier slams "cowboy" US pilot over fatal friendly fire LONDON (AFP) - A British soldier who survived a fatal friendly fire incident has launched a scathing attack on the US pilot responsible for killing his comrade. "He (the pilot) had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy... He'd just gone out on a jolly," Lance Corporal Steven Gerrard told The Times of London, regarding the incident Friday.
.... "Combat is what I've been trained for. I can command my vehicle. I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me."
- - - - - US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death This was not the only family who had taken what they thought was a last chance for safety. A father, baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave. On the bridge itself a dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a donkey. As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third child, 'Did you see all that?' he asked, his eyes filled with tears. 'Did you see that little baby girl? I carried her body and buried it as best I could but I had no time. It really gets to me to see children being killed like this, but we had no choice.' Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they surveyed the scene. 'The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy,' said Corporal Ryan Dupre.' 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.' Only a few days earlier these had still been the bright-eyed small-town boys with whom I crossed the border at the start of the operation. They had rolled towards Nasiriya, a strategic city beside the Euphrates, on a mission to secure a safe supply route for troops on the way to Baghdad. They had expected a welcome, or at least a swift surrender. Instead they had found themselves lured into a bloody battle, culminating in the worst coalition losses of the war '16 dead, 12 wounded and two missing marines as well as five dead and 12 missing servicemen from an army convoy' and the humiliation of having prisoners paraded on Iraqi television. - - - - - Reporter Peter Arnett: U.S. War Plan Has Failed Journalist Peter Arnett, covering the war from Baghdad, told state-run Iraqi TV in an interview aired Sunday that the American-led coalition's first war plan had failed because of Iraq's resistance and said strategists are "trying to write another war plan." .... He said the United States is reappraising the battlefield and delaying the war, maybe for a week, "and rewriting the war plan. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan." "Clearly, the American war plans misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces," Arnett said during the interview broadcast by Iraq's satellite television station and monitored by The Associated Press in Egypt. Arnett said it is clear that within the United States there is growing opposition to the war and a growing challenge to President Bush about the war's conduct. "Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States," he said. "It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments." - - - - - Three British soldiers in Iraq have been ordered home after objecting to the conduct of the war. It is understood they have been sent home for protesting that the war is killing innocent civilians. .... Three British soldiers sent home after protesting at civilian deaths Any refusal of soldiers to obey orders is highly embarrassing to the government, with ministers becoming increasingly worried about the way the war is developing. It is also causing concern to British military chiefs who are worried about growing evidence of civilians being killed in fighting involving American soldiers around urban areas in southern Iraq. - - - - - Report: Rumsfeld Ignored Pentagon Advice on Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly rejected advice from Pentagon planners that substantially more troops and armor would be needed to fight a war in Iraq, New Yorker Magazine reported. In an article for its April 7 edition, which goes on sale on Monday, the weekly said Rumsfeld insisted at least six times in the run-up to the conflict that the proposed number of ground troops be sharply reduced and got his way.
- - - - - OFFENSE AND DEFENSE Rumsfeld’s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known. He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on maintaining costly mechanized divisions. In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or “snowflakes,” as they’re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about generals having “the slows”—a reference to Lincoln’s characterization of General George McClellan. “In those conditions—an atmosphere of derision and challenge—the senior officers do not offer their best advice,” a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. “He was looking at the Chief and waving his hand,” the witness said, “saying, ‘Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?’” - - - - - The 'Palestinization' of Iraq AMMAN - American tanks are now ripping at the heart of Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" and the cradle of civilization; the US 5th Corps is already engaging the Medina division of the Republican Guards as B52s increase their bombing raids of the "red line" in the outer ring of defenses of Baghdad, over which hangs a surreal, dust-induced dark orange cloud. For 280 million Arabs, the symbolic effect of the tanks in the country is as devastating as a lethal sandstorm. But Saddam Hussein seems to be one step ahead. It doesn't matter that Iraqi TV was silenced by a showering of Tomahawks (although domestic broadcasts, as well as the international signal, have been restored). Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV will be on hand to record the ultimate image that Saddam knows is capable of igniting the Arab world into an ocean of fire: an American tank in the streets of Baghdad juxtaposed with an American tank in the streets of Gaza. To date, an estimated 5,200 Iraqis have crossed the Jordanian-Iraqi border, going back "to defend their homeland" as they invariably put it. In already one week of a war that was marketed by the Pentagon as "clean" and "quick" and which is revealing itself to be bloody and protracted, not a single Iraqi refugee has crossed the al-Karama border point into eastern Jordan. - - - - - An American Myth Rides Into the Sunset In this regard, President Bush's self-presentation culminates a progression long in the works. We've been on the way to becoming a different America for a while. A little more than a year ago, the old and vanishing American mythology of common-man virtue enjoyed an unexpected comeback — in the aftermath of 9/11. That antiquated ethic returned to infuse our romance with the sacrificial firefighters and police officers, and the average citizens martyred in our national tragedy. Its presence was palpable in the self-image of an ordinary embattled people rising to the occasion in countless ways, as if we were once more "out in some strange night caring for each other," as Ernie Pyle wrote of the G.I.'s he chronicled. Perhaps that is why so many Americans now feel even more painfully the loss of a myth that, in truth, has been on its sickbed for a generation. As the invasion of Iraq began, a lament could be heard across the political spectrum. A letter in The Times seemed typical: "The president was speaking and I realized that an old and dear friend of mine was gone." What Americans grieve for is not reality. We've carried out regime change before, whether on Chief Sitting Bull or Manuel Noriega. We've also waged elective wars, whether in the Dominican Republic or the Philippines. But to call it a myth is not to diminish its importance. Mythologies are essential to defining who we are and, more importantly, who we want to be. We caught a powerful glimpse of our myth's possibilities, just before its end. Sept. 11 gave us its final spark, like the bright flash that the sun shoots up before it sets for good. |
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