TV anchors choke back tears: I gag

Mr Brown, my least favourite man on American television, pressed his lips together and pinched his nose in a manly grimace of repressed emotion.

"It's just an unsettling thing, General," he said. "I mean there's so - you know what - OK." He broke off here, to cough back tears. "There's just - there's just so much at stake for so many people. And then to have this sort of thing happen ... it's just so sad."

CNN's military consultant, General Wesley Clark, gazed at Brown's quivering nostrils with ill-concealed embarrassment. I was praying that he would tell Brown to pull himself together but alas, he took pity on the big girl's blouse. "It is unsettling," he agreed, in the manner of a kindly uncle comforting a hysterical child. "But you know, our leaders have to be able to deal with things like this. These things do happen."

Throw Out the Anchor

Aaron Brown - CNN’s Lead Anchor of "Newsnight"
Aaron Brown’s slow motion nervous breakdown makes for some fun TV watchin! This guy’s ego is so huge that he thinks this war is being fought so he can add it to his resume.

Daryn Kagan - CNN's beautiful face stationed in Kuwait City
Kagan has basically one purpose on CNN: To find Kuwait's daily English newspapers and to read the headlines over the air. Sometimes she also points to the pictures and describes them. However, she's slightly more interesting than that...the tension between Aaron Brown and Kagan whenever she reports can only mean one thing…he’s sleeping with her.

they recall the period after the first Gulf War in 1991, when they rose up in open revolt against Saddam. U.S.-led coalition forces -- having driven the Iraqi army from Kuwait -- were only a few miles away from the outskirts of Basra, but remained there, abandoning the Shiites at the last minute to the wrath of Saddam's thugs.

About 200,000 Iraqi Shiites were brutally slaughtered in the south by Saddam's forces after the failed uprising...This fact alone explains why coalition troops fighting "to liberate" Iraqis have not yet been greeted with open arms.

It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans – if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB 7492. The letter "B" is scratched and could be an "H". This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon's "Lot" number. It reads: MFR 96214 09.

A two-year-old girl, Saida Jaffar, swaddled in bandages, a tube into her nose, another into her stomach. All I could see of her was her forehead, two small eyes and a chin. Beside her, blood and flies covered a heap of old bandages and swabs. Not far away, lying on a dirty bed, was three-year- old Mohamed Amaid, his face, stomach, hands and feet all tied tightly in bandages. A great black mass of congealed blood lay at the bottom of his bed.

A billion pounds of taxpayers' money was thrown away in propping up Saddam's regime and doing favours to arms firms. It was abundantly clear Saddam was a monster in human form. Britain did not manufacture this monster, but it turned a blind eye to the savage brutality of his regime. Britain also knew Saddam had chemical and biological weapons because Western companies sold him all the ingredients necessary...

The timing of the launch of the war has worked in [Saddam's] favour...The coming months will bring a rise in temperatures that can reach 50C. Underneath American and British combat gear and chemical and biological weapons masks, the temperatures may well reach 70C, and this will restrict the troops' ability to fight.

Saddam is much weaker than we think he is. He's weaker militarily. We know he's got about a third of what he had in 1991. But it's a house of cards. He rules by fear because he knows there is no underlying support. Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder...

...I would be surprised if we need anything like the 200,000 figure that is sometimes discussed in the press. A much smaller force, principally special operations forces, but backed up by some regular units, should be sufficient. Of the 400,000 in Saddam's army, I'll be surprised if ten percent are loyal to Saddam. And the other 90 percent won't be completely passive. Many of them will come over to the opposition.

Hymn to Ninkasi

When you pour out the filtered beer
   of the collector vat,
It is like the onrush of
   Tigris and Euphrates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the
  filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is like the onrush of
  Tigris and Euphrates.

The Lament for Sumer and Urim

In the city, those who had not been felled by weapons
succumbed to hunger.
Hunger filled the city like water, it would not cease.
This hunger contorted people's faces, twisted their muscles.
Its people were as if drowning in a pond,
they gasped for breath.
Its king breathed heavily in his palace, all alone.
Its people dropped their weapons,
their weapons hit the ground.
They struck their necks with their hands and cried.
They sought counsel with each other,
they searched for clarification:
"Alas, what can we say about it?
What more can we add to it?
How long until we are finished off by this catastrophe?
Inside Urim there is death, outside it there is death.
Inside it we are to be finished off by famine.
Outside it we are to be finished off by Elamite weapons.
In Urim the enemy oppresses us, oh, we are finished."

I have no doubt why Baghdad is never discussed. War in its streets is too awful to contemplate. No soldiers are more skilled at urban fighting than the British. Yet they are finding it hard to pacify even “friendly” Basra. The city appears to have been terrorised into defiance by units of Saddamist irregulars. Students of this strategy need look no further than the Red Army commissars in Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad. They murdered an entire division of their own side to make them fight, but they won. British units round Basra have had to resort to long- range bombing and shelling, hoping that this will inspire the oppressed citizens to rise against the irregulars, somehow.

It now appears that Donald Rumsfeld, standing at his trademark lectern from which he micromanaged the war plans, blocked a request from his field commander, General Tommy Franks, to start moving two heavy divisions to the Gulf. There were already enough forces in the theatre, he argued, according to officials in the Pentagon.

The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car...

...It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.

"The Time for Debate Is Over" is a pretty obvious political idea. That’s when the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks can be forced to publicly apologize for criticizing the president, Tom Daschle can be dragged on the air to pledge allegiance to the chief (mumbling through what appears to be a mouthful of his own testicles) and all the important votes in the Senate are 99-0. Your basic fascist’s wet dream. I saw a lot of this stuff when I lived in Uzbekistan many years ago...

You see, we’ve already got a situation down in Basra where the British army have admitted firing artillery into the city of Basra, and then winging on afterward talking about ‘We’re being fired at by soldiers hiding among civilians’. Well, I’m sorry; all soldiers defending cities are among civilians. But now the British are firing artillery shells into the heavily populated city of Basra. When the British were fired upon with mortars or with snipers from the cragg on the state or the bogside in Delhi and in Northern Ireland, they did not use artillery, but here, apparently, it is ok to use artillery on a crowded city. What on Earth is the British army doing in Iraq firing artillery into a city after invading the country?

"This is the ground war that was not going to happen in (Rumsfeld's) plan," said a Pentagon official. Because the Pentagon didn't commit overwhelming force, "now we have three divisions strung out over 300-plus miles and the follow-on division, our reserve, is probably three weeks away from landing."

McCaffrey said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had misjudged the nature of the conflict. Asked if Rumsfeld made a mistake by not sending more troops to start the offensive, McCaffrey replied: "Yes, sure. I think everybody told him that."

Mustafa Mohammed Ali said he understood US forces going straight to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but was outraged that they had attacked his city and killed civilians. "I don't want forces to come into the city. They have an objective, they go straight to the target," he said. "There's no room in the Saddam hospital because of the wounded. It's the only hospital in town. When I saw the dead Americans I cheered in my heart...

....The marines are aggrieved: aggrieved that the Iraqis aren't more grateful, aggrieved that the Iraqis are shooting at them, aggrieved that the US army's spearhead 3rd Infantry Division tore through Nassiriya earlier in the invasion without making it safe.

Like dominoes, the regimes in the region -- first Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, then Lebanon and the PLO, and finally Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia -- are slated to capitulate, collapse or face U.S. military action. To those states, says cabal ringleader Richard Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory committee, "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'"

As we sift the debris of the war to liberate Iraq, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.

In footage seen across the Arab world, the station aired grisly and explicit images of the dead and wounded, including a child with the back of its skull blown off and blood-stained people being treated on the floor of a hospital.

Hi,
You forgot the last part of the scenario for war in Iraq. It is where Israel crushes all comers and marches to the Euphrates River. Back home in the U.S., people such as yourself are tried under the U.S. Sedition Act and shot to death.
Goodnight Sir,
and please remember it has been the left's attack on American Values (the ones you hate) that finally convinced the vast silent majority of Americans that the cancer called the left must be exterminated once and for all.
Your friend, a ex-member of the democratic party.
Tom
p.s. Eat shit and die!

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'Boom-boom tomorrow?' Iraq's fears and tears

Like many Iraqis I met during my two-month stay in Baghdad, Suad wards off any discussion of politics with a flick of her hand. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she would say. Instead, in broken English, she talked about her wish to learn the language and to understand what life is like in America or Britain. It is an odd enthusiasm given that those two countries are about to bomb her own into oblivion.

In recent weeks, Suad would ask me every day: “Boom-boom tomorrow?” “Not yet,” I would tell her, and her face would brighten with relief. This time she did not need to ask. She knew what was happening by the mood of panic in the city, by the sight of vendors wheeling their goods home to hide, by the telephone calls from her relatives urging her not to go to work after today.

As I explained to Suad that I had to leave Baghdad for reasons out of my control she burst into tears. “Don’t leave us,” she said, clinging to me. “We don’t know what will happen here.”

I felt a sense of guilt, of betrayal. We journalists can leave; the ordinary Iraqis who have become our friends must remain to face the war alone.

According to two fish-cutters at the New Square Fish Market, the carp was about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte fish for Sabbath dinner when it suddenly began shouting apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew...

'It said "Tzaruch shemirah" and "Hasof bah",' he told the New York Times, 'which essentially means that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is near.'...

However, word spread far and wide and Nivelo complains he has been plagued by phone calls from as far away as London and Israel. The story has since been amplified by repetition and some now believe the fish's outburst was a warning about the dangers of the impending war in Iraq.

Some say they fear the born-again President Bush believes he is preparing the world for the Second Coming of Christ, and war in Iraq is just the opening salvo in the battle of Armageddon.

A former military aide to General Norman Schwarzkopf has warned that a US-led war against Iraq could turn into a disaster that echoes the bloody debacle of Somalia rather than the relatively painless 1991 Gulf war...

Colonel Turner outlined a worst-case scenario: "Within hours of our attack, Saddam launches Scuds on Israel. Israel's government launches a full-scale attack on Iraq, creating a holy war. Saddam, threatened with his own survival, uses chemical and biological weapons and human shields. He torches his own oil fields, thousands of his own people are killed. Photos of US soldiers amid landscapes of Iraqi civilian bodies blanket the world press which aligns unanimously against the US."

He then envisaged the US left to administer a post-Saddam Iraq with minimal international co-operation and open to terror attacks from al- Qa'ida. North Korea could take advantage and start exporting nuclear weapons."These are not remote possibilities, but in my view reasonable, possibly even likely outcomes," he concluded.

One of the water-entrances, Beo-Kayzer contains recycled liquids from the previously Martian ocean of Beloria. The thinnest of the devil's butlers, Rolf O'Donovan, perished in the tubes of Beo-Kayzer and is remembered in the song "O'Donovan's Gone". A rare moss, Hulis, thrives in the approach tunnels since it was transplanted from Goali in the 1860s.

As the horse-trading at the United Nations reaches its climax, it is worth recalling Palmerston’s maxim about international relations: in diplomacy, there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests...

Palmerston’s cynical dictum is often quoted by people who lament the absence of idealism in world affairs. But if there is one lesson from the global catastrophe evolving out of the Iraq crisis, it is that rational calculations of material interest are a far more benign principle for political action than an idealism which is all too often dogmatic, and can sometimes blend into the single-minded fundamentalism of which pacifists and “internationalists”, such as Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac, are as guilty as warmongers and unilateralists, such as Ariel Sharon or George W. Bush.