Even though the war is over, US soldiers continue to kill Iraqi civilians almost every day, for a variety of reasons. But Falluja's tragedy is of a different order of magnitude. To prevent more such disastrous incidents and stop the security situation deteriorating further, an inquiry must be urgently held, preferably with UN oversight and with reference to the Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying forces. For reasons of law, morality and self-interest, our relentlessly self-righteous government has a clear obligation to demand that its ally comply. Meanwhile, 82nd Airborne units should be withdrawn from Falluja. If necessary, they could be replaced by better-disciplined British troops.

Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest "book" in history.

The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name.

10 years after the accident, 2 out of the 4 reactors are still functioning despite assurances that they would be closed. Holes in the cement sarcophagus or covering, encasing the exploded reactor bleed radioactivity daily. There are over 1,000 square metres of holes and the concrete structure is crumbling.

...One of its most charismatic and powerful champions is Osama bin Laden, the billionaire scion of a leading Saudi family. Fervent and devout, he was described to me by one U.S. intelligence official as "a religious fanatic with enormous wealth -- a man with a vision, who knows precisely how he wants to convert that vision into reality."...

...when I asked Hosni Mubarak about Bin Laden, he winced. "He wants to take over the world," he said. "He's a megalomaniac." Mubarak then expressed both annoyance and concern about what he saw as the passive attitude of Western governments, particularly those of Britain, Germany, and the United States, in permitting militant Egyptian Islamic groups to operate freely from their soil.

It was midnight, Zabibah’s favorite time of night. Dancing through moonlit beams of moonlight, she made her way to the haranashzizi.

“Oh King, how may we please you?” Zabibah inquired.

“A good subject must always obey the king,” the king responded to the inquiry. “A good subject will honor their king by being good, helping others, and bettering themselves. A good subject must endeavor to prepare their mind for the good of the kingdom, working diligently at their studies, especially chemistry and biology. Very hard.”

The King stood boldly within the radiation chamber, staring at his love Zabibah.

“My King!”

“No!” the doctor implored, “the radiation is too severe! You cannot enter that room!”

The King leaned against the room’s window, slowly sliding down on its side, staring outward at Zabibah. Sad, emotional music slowly emanated from the room.

“No Zabibah, this is necessary,” said the King. “In the order to save every child in Kwiraq, it was necessary for the warp core to be repaired... (cough) The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... (slipping down the window)... and never forget that the love you take, (cough)... is equal to the love you take... (slipping further down the window)... I am, and always shall be, your King.”

Day twenty-nine, then, of the nascent century’s lamest-yet war, and by all reports it’s all over bar the shouting.

Well, all over bar the shouting, guerrilla attacks, sectarian unrest, unexploded cluster-bomb warheads, depleted uranium-soaked cancer hotspots, and the selling-off of any of the Free Iraqi People’s remaining assets (those not already sold, bombed, looted or smashed) to companies linked to the current US government, and so on. But mostly shouting. There’s a lot of shouting.

(NB. Free Iraqi People is a registered trademark wholly owned by Bush & Son Permawar Corp. Unauthorised usage prohibited by international treaty.)

Discoveries began with the first expeditions. Through manholes and building basements the boys wriggled into labyrinths under the Russian capital. First, they explored the bomb shelters under Leningradsky Prospekt, then they came across an Academy of Oceanology warehouse. "Imagine walking along endless corridors," recalls Mikhailov, "something dripping from the ceiling, the uneven light of torches. And all of sudden you find yourself in a room full of tanks of formalin, containing various sea monsters."

They soon went deeper underground. According to Mikhailov there are about six levels under Moscow, and in some places as many as 12, including old sewer systems, fountain foundations, and sloping drainage tunnels entangled in the depths.

...at a time when giving a false statement to a census officer would at best result in transportation to the Antipodes, and at worst have the miscreant dancing the Tyburn jig, we can only admire commercial book keeper Alexander Penis, of Liverpool, Fanny Clam of - where else - Huddersfield, and August Wanker from Hanover in Germany, then resident in Clerkenwell. And who can fail to admire the wag from Suffolk who decided that Letitia Bollocks should be recorded for posterity?

It was May of 1994, nine years ago, when the US military planners had first realized that North Korea had the bomb and devised nuclear attack plans under William Perry, the then US Secretary of Defense. Perry had estimated that North Korea would have about 100 nuclear warheads by 2000. Dr. Kim Myong Chul, an expert on Kim Jong Il's war plans, has recently confirmed that North Korea has more than 100 nukes including hydrogen bombs.

...the opposition has displayed greater aggressiveness both in attacking US Special Forces beyond their bases, and in concentrating larger numbers of fighters. The planting of mines on roads used by US patrols, which was begun last year, continues; but is now being reinforced with close-in ambushes. The Girishk ambush has been the only one to result in Coalition fatalities this year, but on 10 February a US patrol was attacked in the Baghran valley of upper Helmand province, by assailants using rocket propelled grenades and machine guns. Other ambushes have occurred near Asadabad in eastern Kunar and near Shkin, a well-known blackspot on the border of Paktika province with Pakistan.

On 25 April 2003, the newspaper Dagbladet (Norway) published photos of armed US soldiers forcing Iraqi men to walk naked through a park.

On the chests of the men had been scrawled an Arabic phrase that translates as "Ali Baba - Thief."

A military officer states that the men are thieves, and that this technique will be used again.

No word yet from the newly liberated Iraqi people about some of them being summarily found guilty of theft, forced at gunpoint to strip, having a racist phrase written on their bodies, and then made to walk naked in public. No doubt the Arab/Muslim world is impressed by this display of "democracy," "freedom," "due process," and "no cruel or unusual punishment."

We wonder if the soldiers will be using this technique on their comrades who stole $13.1 million in Iraq. Or the journalists who looted Iraq's art.

Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing Arabs and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle of human civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in Beirut during the '70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints manned by armed tribesmen. The war has, however, managed to unite Iraqis in one respect: Everyone loathes the United States.

Rule 1) Protect yourself by proving your loyalty.

When fascism is sweeping the nation, the best method for blending in is to make it clear that you are incapable of original thought. This is best accomplished by parroting the remarks of your leaders. Only question the press or media, publicly, when their position differs from that of your leaders. When you do denounce the press or media, make sure that you do so with patriotic indignation. Clearly, anyone who expresses a thought that diverges from the approved range of thoughts is engaging in sedition.

Israelis on Wheels!

So back to the Merkava. A great design, yes. But the whole greatness of the design advertises the weakness of the Israelis: they don't like taking casualties. You're thinking, “Nobody likes it you jerk!” Except that's totally untrue. Lots of places like taking casualties. The Shiites - they never felt prouder or happier. The Russians under Stalin - they died crying for joy. All you fucking happy people - you think everybody's like you? Lots of people want to die. I want to die! There's more like me than like you, you smug bastards.

Tom Clancy Is Not One of Us

“Warlord” - God, that's the most beautiful word in the language. That's the job you want. With 200 million dollars you could buy your own army. Take some place like the southern Sudan, where there are a half-dozen ethnic and religious wars going at once. You know how far that kind of money would go in a place like that? You could not only buy your own army, you could buy your own slaves. Yeah: slaves. They have'em. They may not be the cutest girls in the world, but they're thin at least and they have a good attitude: trained to submit. Ritual scarification. You could have your pick from every village. They'd be honored. “At your service!” No age or consent problems either. Brand 'em so they don't go astray.

Iraq 2: Here Comes the Dumb-Ass Sequel

No Saddam means crazy Kurds, crazy Shiites, scared Saudis, angry Wahhabi loonies, desperate Palestinians...it means we go right up close to the ol' hornets' nest and hit it again with a big, big stick.

Boy, it sure is hard to predict what'll happen then, huh?

That's IF the abu Cheney clan of the desert oil wells is dumb enough to really do it, really send in 250,000 troops to take Iraq. Militarily it'll be a joke. You could do it with a battalion of SAS. Those Iraqi soldiers were surrendering to camera crews. That's the easy part.

The hard part is making up a new happy Western Iraq. Won't happen; can't happen. Anybody who ain't thick as two planks knows that. So will they do it? Are they really that dumb?

Among the big surprises of the two weeks following the fall of the Baath Party in Iraq is the way in which Shiite religious leaders and parties moved immediately into the vacuum...Eastern cities like Baqubah and Sadra are reportedly under Shiite control with apparent backing from Iran. Some Failis or Shiite Kurds who largely emigrated to Iran under Saddam Hussein's regime are now coming back to Iraq with Iranian backing (a Faili militia from Iran is reported to have recently taken over the eastern city of Badra).

Deborah Wolfe, a Canadian citizen who was just breast-feeding her son and changing his diaper while en route between Houston and Vancouver, says her "subversive" actions led to her being threatened with detainment, RCMP involvement and legal charges for terrorist action against a U.S. citizen in international airspace while on an American flight during a time of war.

Recently I was deeply vexed by the news that a professional author, who of all people should know better, has dismissed the burning of the National Library in Baghdad on the grounds that any book destroyed in the fire could simply be reprinted. There are moments when you find out more about someone’s scholarship and research habits than you’d ever want to know.

Apparently he was unaware that whereas reprinting might serve to reconstitute his high school library, substantial research libraries contain all sorts of odd things, possibly odd old things, some of which may be sole copies. This goes double for major research libraries, which are textual mathom-houses. Moreover, at the time that some of these odd things were catalogued, they may not have been properly recognized for what they were. (This is, incidentally, why I hate having to do research in closed-stack library systems: You have to take the cataloguer’s word on everything.) Anything can turn up there...

...I’m sure there’ll continue to be some ignorant barbarians who’ll insist that the library was no great loss, and that Donald Rumsfeld isn’t a nyekulturniy lout as well as a profoundly incompetent Secretary of Defense. They’re nothing new in the history of the world. I just wish that so much of the work of civilization didn’t consist of trying to recover from their little sprees.

Donald Rumsfeld, possibly the greatest philistine since Genghis Khan's grandson, who burned Baghdad in the thirteenth century, dismissed the carnage as if destroying the audit trail of civilisation mattered less than ripping out Saddam's 24-carat shower-fittings. Such insouciance does not simply suggest a cultural nihilist with the curatorial instincts of Homer Simpson. It implies the wish...to deny the truth. Lying is contagious. Many supporters of the war also choose to minimise the disaster because they wanted cheering Iraqis, not anarchic vandals whose actions provide a dangerous augury. Reality does not suit the hawkish case.

FORMER Irish Attorney-General Peter Sutherland and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped sell nuclear reactors worth $200m to North Korea, the Sunday Independent can reveal...

...The multimillion-dollar reactor deal was struck just a year before President George W Bush branded the reclusive communist state part of an "axis of evil". American nuclear experts warned last week that radioactive components from the reactors could be used to develop powerful nuclear weapons. Now Pyongyang says this is exactly what it intends to do...

...Mr Sutherland and Mr Rumsfeld, who work together on several high-level projects, were both board members of a Zurich-based energy company, ABB, which sold two light-water nuclear reactors to the communists in 2000.

...with a little more help from his CIA pals, he continued to plot, plunder and massacre his way to the head-beast slot, where we anointed him our newest very best friend. Not just because of the Cold War or Iraq's rich oil deposits, but also because he went after our former best friend and newest major enemy, Iran. We supported our fave new despot with the works: arms and munitions, precursors for chemical and biological weapons, and intelligence information gained from our ultrasecret intelligence intercepts of Iranian radio traffic and other hot skinny from our satellites showing up-to-the-minute Iranian battle dispositions.

Even current SecDef Donald Rumsfeld rushed to Saddam's palace in 1983 to bow and scrape and assure the Bully of Baghdad he had a Ronald Reagan-signed blank check for almost any bombs and bullets in our arsenal. After which our generals and admirals taught him how to use them, completing his morph into a master of Military Miscalculation.

Apparent lobbying by American art dealers to dismantle Iraq's strict export laws has heightened fears about the looting of the country's antiquities as order breaks down in the last stages of the war...

...alarm bells had been set ringing by reports of a meeting between a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), with US defence and state department officials before the start of the war. The group offered help in preserving Iraq's invaluable archaeological collections, but archaeologists fear there is a hidden agenda to ease the way for exports post-Saddam.

CNN hit bottom Wednesday morning, when anchor Kyra Phillips interviewed Ali's doctor in Kuwait, Dr. Imad al-Najada, who explained that although Ali told reporters he was grateful for his treatment, he also said he hopes no other "children in the war will suffer like what he suffered."

Phillips seemed shocked by Ali's apparent inability to understand we were only trying to help him. "Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?" Poor al-Najada had to explain that the doctors were more interested in treating the boy than indoctrinating him...

...there is also something dangerous – and deeply disturbing – about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I followed one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town.

The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge – an explanation that is growing very thin – and that the fires are started by "remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I...

...So who are they, this army of arsonists? I recognised one the other day, a middle-aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt, and the second time he saw me he pointed a Kalashnikov at me. What was he frightened of? Who was he working for? In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why didn't the Americans stop this?

As I said, something is going terribly wrong in Baghdad and something is going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States government. Why, for example, did Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence, claim last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction in Baghdad? His statement was a lie. But why did he make it?

The Americans say they don't have enough troops to control the fires. This is also untrue. If they don't, what are the hundreds of soldiers deployed in the gardens of the old Iran-Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the hundreds camped in the rose gardens of the President Palace?

The art historian and archaeologist John Malcolm Russell on The Connection...just called the sacking of Baghdad's museums The greatest catastrophe ever to befall a cultural institution in the history of the world.

More than the burning of the library in Alexandria? This guy is in a position to know. Long after everything else from this war is forgotten... this is the one thing that people will remember, he says.

Iraq’s priceless national collection traced the origins of modern civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia — the birthplace of writing, cities, codified law, mathematics, medicine and astronomy. Its virtual destruction in little more than a day of lawlessness is seen as a disaster comparable to the 5th-century destruction of the library at Alexandria, or an earlier sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.

The pillage of the collection is considered to be not just Iraq’s loss but the world’s, and has distressed Western archaeologists and historians as much as those in Iraq. One — Professor John Russell, of the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston — broke down in tears yesterday as he described the treasures lost...

...Television coverage of the looted museum made it difficult to recognise individual pieces, he said. “I saw a vaguely familiar statue broken on the floor, but it’s hard to recognise things because the museum is so trashed. It’s different seeing these antiquities upright and intact.”

Professor Russell said: “My voice hasn’t been steady since Friday.”

These are the people who hate big government budgets and world-changing government programs, yet whose faces turn purple with excitement when that same government racks up huge debts to pay for world-changing programs that involve bombs, troops and missiles.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel David Lapan, told BBC News Online: "Since then there've been a number of studies - by the UK's Royal Society and the World Health Organisation, for example - into the health risks of DU, or the lack of them.

"It's fair to say the 1990 study has been overtaken by them. One thing we've found in these various studies is that there are no long-term effects from DU.

"And given that, I don't believe we have any plans for a DU clean-up in Iraq."

One UK Gulf veteran is Ray Bristow, a former marathon runner.

In 1999 he told the BBC: "I gradually noticed that every time I went out for a run my distance got shorter and shorter, my recovery time longer and longer.

"Now, on my good days, I get around quite adequately with a walking stick, so long as it's short distances. Any further, and I need to be pushed in a wheelchair."

Zimansky said Iraq's isolation during Hussein's rule meant that a great deal of material had remained unstudied and uncatalogued for years. An as-yet unresearched Sippar library of cuneiform clay tablets lay in the museum's basement and -- if it survived -- may contain the missing pieces of the Gilgamesh Epic, a heroic tale conceived by the Sumerians and written and rewritten in Mesopotamia for more than 1,000 years.

"The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over. It's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase and you see it twenty times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases?"
After pausing for laughter, Rumsfeld delivered the punch line: "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?" Yes you ignorant pig, it is.

So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.

I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.

And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?

In the months leading up to the Iraq war, U.S. scholars repeatedly urged the Defense Department to protect Iraq's priceless archaeological heritage from looters, and warned specifically that the National Museum of Antiquities was the single most important site in the country.

Late in January, a mix of scholars, museum directors, art collectors and antiquities dealers asked for and were granted a meeting at the Pentagon to discuss their misgivings. McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said yesterday that he went back twice more, and he and colleagues peppered Defense Department officials with e-mail reminders in the weeks before the war began.

"I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected," Gibson said. Instead, even with U.S. forces firmly in control of Baghdad last week, looters breached the museum, trashed its galleries, burned its records, invaded its vaults and smashed or carried off thousands of artifacts dating from the founding of ancient Sumer around 3,500 B.C. to the end of Islam's Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 A.D.

"Is this your liberation?" one frustrated shopkeeper screamed at the crew of a U.S. tank as a gang of youths helped themselves to everything in his small hardware store and carted booty off in the wheelbarrows that had also been on sale.

"Hell, it ain't my job to stop them," drawled one young marine, lighting a cigarette as he looked on. "Goddamn Iraqis will steal anything if you let them. Look at them."

The United States was fiercely criticised around the world yesterday for its failure to protect Baghdad's Iraq National Museum where, under the noses of US troops, looters stole or destroyed priceless artefacts up to 7,000 years old.

Not a single pot or display case remained intact, according to witnesses, after a 48-hour rampage at the museum – perhaps the world's greatest repository of Mesopotamian culture. US forces intervened only once, for half an hour, before leaving and allowing the looters to continue.

Archaeologists, poets, cultural historians and international legal experts, including many in America itself, accused Washington of violating the 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of artistic treasures in wartime.

Worse, in their search for gold and gems, the looters gained access to the museum's underground vaults, where they smashed the contents of the thousands of tin trunks in which curatorial staff had painstakingly packed priceless ceramics that tell the story of life from one civilisation to the next down through 9000 fabled years in Mesopotamia.

In tears of anger and frustration, Moysen Hassan, 56, an archaeologist, itemised the pieces he was certain were stolen: a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era, which began about 3360BC; a sculpted head of a woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities; gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings more than 4000 years old; and a rare collection of gold-trimmed ivory sculptures.

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, brushes it all off: "Yes, it's untidy; but freedom is untidy," was his flip response to the mayhem. He needs to think again, because how the Iraqis read the conduct of the US forces in these early days will inform their acceptance of the US presence for years to come.

Then he escorted me through the vaults - where the aisles between the ceiling-high shelves were deep with smashed ceramics and the buckled trunks from which they had been dumped. The heads of the ancient Assyrian kings from Mosul lay chipped and broken; the ears had been broken off a stone lion from 3000BC to 2500BC; carvings from the early Christian era in Hatra were in pieces; and relics from Nineveh had been thrown against the wall.

...we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar "3,500 BC" it said on one shelf corner had been bashed to pieces.

Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad...

...The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one not even the museum guard in the grey gown had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewellery glinting amid the piles of smashed pots...

...I contacted the civil affairs unit of the US Marines in Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that "we're probably going to get down there". Too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their "liberation".

Adnan said U.S. troops did not appear to be doing anything to stop the looting of most public buildings in the capital.

"They try just to protect the oil companies and the oil ministry and everything else is destroyed. They don't do anything, they just watch," he said.

Looters ransacked government buildings, hospitals and schools, along with the National Museum, taking or destroying many of the country's archeological treasures.

A museum worker arrived yesterday to find the administrative offices trashed by looters. The only thing she could salvage was a telephone book-sized volume. She refused to give her name. In tears, she said: 'It is all the fault of the Americans. This is Iraq's civilisation. And it's all gone now.'

The National Museum held artefacts from thousands of years of history in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, widely held to be the site of the world's earliest civilisations. Before the war the museum closed its doors and secretly placed the most precious artefacts in storage, but the metal storeroom doors were smashed and everything was taken.

'This is the property of the nation and the treasure of 7,000 years of civilisation,' said museum employee Ali Mahmoud. 'What does this country think it is doing?'

Presidential compounds and the homes of ruling party members are the best pickings, but may be guarded to the bitter end. Come well armed. For the early bird there will likely be modern electronic entertainment gear, quality alcohol and foodstuffs, with European furnishings and housefittings available for the more determined.

...the Southern Baptist Convention, an ardent supporter of the war as an opportunity to bring Christianity to the Middle East. It says it has 25,000 trained evangelists ready to enter Iraq.

"That would [mean] a heart change would go on in that part of the world," Mark Liederbach of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary explained in a recent speech to the SBC. "That's what we need to be praying for. That's how a Christian wages spiritual warfare."

I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim al- Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a former defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid – "Chemical" Ali who gassed the Kurds and was killed last week in Basra – and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys to make off with the contents of these massive villas.

It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the gutted home of one former minister of interior, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still lay dead at the wheel...

...After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt – then shot and killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place.

Former CIA director James Woolsey - mentioned at the Pentagon as a possible official in postwar Iraq - recently said the United States is involved in a new world war against Iran, the "fascists of Iraq and Syria" and Islamic extremists.

Yesterday the president seemed smilingly unaware even of the contradiction, unbothered that the approach which has made peace possible in Northern Ireland is the very opposite of the Bush philosophy for the rest of the world. He sang a hymn of praise to the Belfast peace process yesterday, even as he tramples on its teachings across the globe.

So the president seizes on the welcome US and British troops are now receiving in Iraq, as if that augurs an amicable, long-term relationship. His in-flight briefing material should have told him that Northern Ireland's Catholics welcomed British troops, too, back in 1969 - and look where that led. Ulster's lesson is that a military presence, no matter how well received initially, is soon resented.

You want to pick him up and hug him, but the lightest touch would harm him further. Stumps are all he has for arms and there are deep burns to his abdomen, lower chest and possibly his back and legs.

The face of 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, bandaged and beseeching, will be one of the terrible, enduring images of this war. The natural human instinct is to flinch and turn away. But all of us who supported the war, and especially those, like me, who championed regime change to alleviate human suffering, must do the opposite. We must look hard and face the question: how can any war be worth such terrible pain?

The surgery is increasingly done in primitive circumstances. At the Kindi, doctors have been able to give only 800mg of ibuprofen for surgery – the equivalent of two headache pills. Clean towels cannot be supplied because the hospital washing machines overload the emergency generators.

"I think they're cowards," Boggs said of the parents or Fedayeen paramilitaries who send out children to the battlefield. "I think they thought we wouldn't shoot kids. But we showed them we don't care. We are going to do what we have to do to stay alive and keep ourselves safe."

The attempt to assassinate Saddam raises another question: If sophisticated intelligence methods made it possible to locate Saddam, and if he could be liquidated through the use of smart bombs, was this great war really necessary?...

food shortages threaten 14 million in Ethiopia, 7 million in Zimbabwe, 3.2 million in Malawi, 2.9 million in Sudan, 2.7 million in Zambia, 1.9 million in Angola, 1 million in Eritrea, as well as millions more in Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique, Uganda, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the western Sahel

Now you've really gone over the line, moron.

The comment "I'm sorry," he says, "but the chick got in the way." by a soldier on the battlefield should have never have been reported.

It looks very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit to the presidential palace, the videotape of Saddam Hussein's golden loo. But the innocent are bleeding and screaming with pain to bring us our exciting television pictures and to provide Messrs Bush and Blair with their boastful talk of victory. I watched two-and-a-half-year-old Ali Najour lying in agony on the bed, his clothes soaked with blood, a tube through his nose, until a relative walked up to me.

"I want to talk to you," he shouted, his voice rising in fury. "Why do you British want to kill this little boy? Why do you even want to look at him? You did this – you did it!"

The young man seized my arm, shaking it violently. "Are you going to make his mother and father come back? Can you bring them back to life for him? Get out! Get out!"

We know in Ireland, in a way that neither the Romans knew nor the Americans know, how terrorism grows, why young men decide to go it alone, ignoring danger to themselves, callously inflicting disaster on an enemy by targeting its civilian population at random as much as the enemy's military might.

We know that the executions after the 1916 Rising in Ireland might have seemed like shock and awe but frightened no one, caused instead a vast number of the civilian population to turn against the British. We know that the shootings in Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1972 did the same.

We know in Ireland how easy it is to inflame a civilian population and how hard it is to calm tempers down thereafter.

We know too the terrible suffering inflicted on the people of New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, many of whom were of Irish origin. I said at the time that I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

I cannot imagine the fear and terror being felt by the population of Iraq, not only for what will happen this week but over the next few years; nor can I imagine the rage against the large and rich forces who represent the culture of the West, my culture, as they lay waste the cities of Iraq and humiliate the population on what looks to some as ambition for power, and seems to me at the very least to have lacked the prudence and wisdom and care one might expect empires to have gathered almost 2,000 years after the decline of Rome.

A man cuddles the body of his infant daughter; her blood drenches them. A woman in black pursues a tank, her arms outstretched; all seven in her family are dead. An American Marine murders a woman because she happens to be standing next to a man in a uniform. "I'm sorry," he says, "but the chick got in the way."...

...To Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, the Iraqis, like all Arabs, were "niggers'', against whom poison gas could be used. They were un-people; and they still are.

"It's simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized,"..."They do appear physically and spiritually cleansed," Llano said.
First, though, the soldiers have to go to one of Llano's hour-and-a-half sermons in his dirt-floor tent. Then the baptism takes an hour of quoting from the Bible.

Hey, I guess there were alternate scenarios to your liberal, appeasement, chicken-little 'war game' after all.
What a surprise, a left-wing whacko overemphasizing the negative. What a moron.

your also an idiot.

Reporters who went to the town [Al-Hilla] on Wednesday filmed exploded canisters of cluster bombs in one residential district.

A 21-minute videotape of the carnage exists and has been seen by reporters in Baghdad.

In one sequence, according to The Independent newspaper, the pictures showed a father holding pieces of his baby and screaming "cowards, cowards" at the camera.

The Iraqi leadership may withdraw the Guard into town, but this would present a problem for Saddam. The Guard is regarded as less loyal than the Special Republican Guard. Until now they were not allowed into Baghdad, for fear of a coup d'etat.

Bakhat Hassan - who lost his daughters, aged two and five, his three-year-old son, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces aged 12 and 15, in the incident - said US soldiers at an earlier checkpoint had waved them through.

As they approached another checkpoint 40km south of Karbala, they waved again at the American soldiers.

"We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe," Hassan said through an Army translator at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital set up at a vast Army support camp near Najaf.

The soldiers didn't wave back. They fired.

"I saw the heads of my two little girls come off," Hassan's heavily pregnant wife, Lamea, 36, said numbly. She repeated herself in a flat, even voice: "My girls - I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead."

Unedited TV footage from Babylon hospital, which was seen by the Guardian, showed the tiny corpse of a baby wrapped up like a doll in a funeral shroud and carried out of the morgue on a pink pallet.

It was laid face-to-face on the pavement against the body of a boy, who looked about 10.Horrifically injured bodies were heaped into pick-up trucks, and were swarmed by relatives of the dead, who accompanied them for burial.

This week’s fine Channel 4 documentary on Churchill by Max Hastings showed how his generals’ most crucial victories were against his crazier ideas. They stopped him, as Alanbrooke put it, “losing the war”. The war was won by a group leadership able to argue with itself and thus overcome “protective stupidity”. Churchill alone is an appalling model for our present leaders. Yet when the smell of war is in their nostrils, they cannot hold back. They listen to the predictions of hawks, watch cruise-missile videos and beware Hamlet’s “native hue of resolution . . . sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”.

The codes on the foot-long shrapnel shard, seen by the Independent correspondent Robert Fisk at the scene of the bombing in the Shu'ale district, came from a weapon manufactured in Texas by Raytheon, the world's biggest producer of "smart" armaments.

Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to the coalition's supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young American marines with orders to shoot anything that moved.

One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.

Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her father. Half his head was missing...

...As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third child, Isabella, was born while he was on board ship en route to the Gulf, appeared beside me.

"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."

"It's a bad situation," said First Sergeant James Thompson, who was running around with a 9mm pistol in his hand. "We don't know who is shooting at us. They are even using women as scouts. The women come out waving at us, or with their hands raised. We freeze, but the next minute we can see how she is looking at our positions and giving them away to the fighters hiding behind a street corner. It's very difficult to distinguish between the fighters and civilians."

Across the square, genuine civilians were running for their lives. Many, including some children, were gunned down in the crossfire. In a surreal scene, a father and mother stood out on a balcony with their children in their arms to give them a better view of the battle raging below. A few minutes later several US mortar shells landed in front of their house. In all probability, the family is dead.

Another man who died was Fitzgerald Jordan, a staff sergeant from Texas. I felt numb when I heard this. I had met Jordan 10 days before we moved into Nasiriya. He was a character, always chewing tobacco and coming up to pat you on the back. He got me to fetch newspapers for him from Kuwait City. Later, we shared a bumpy ride across the desert in the back of a Humvee.

A decorated Gulf war veteran, he used to complain about having to come back to Iraq. "We should have gone all the way to Baghdad 12 years ago when we were here and had a real chance of removing Saddam."

Now Pokorney, Jordan and their comrades lay among unspeakable carnage. An older marine walked by carrying a huge chunk of flesh, so maimed it was impossible to tell which body part it was. With tears in his eyes and blood splattered over his flak jacket, he held the remains of his friend in his arms until someone gave him a poncho to wrap them with.

"I was shooting down a street when suddenly a woman came out and casually began to cross the street with a child no older than 10," said Gunnery Sergeant John Merriman, another Gulf war veteran. "At first I froze on seeing the civilian woman. She then crossed back again with the child and went behind a wall. Within less than a minute a guy with an RPG came out and fired at us from behind the same wall. This happened a second time so I thought, 'Okay, I get it. Let her come out again'.

She did and this time I took her out with my M-16." Others were less sanguine.

Mike Brooks was one of the commanders who had given the order to shoot at civilian vehicles. It weighed on his mind, even though he felt he had no choice but to do everything to protect his marines from another ambush.

Richard Condon, a morning show host for rock station KOOJ, said he wanted the hecklers to "put these goofballs in their place."...

...he concluded, "I think these son-of-a-buggers deserve a bullet in the head."

This followed his proclamation to the crowd at the beach about American military aims that ended with: "And it's about time we nuked Canada's ass!"