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The world needs to hear it again and again: It is the same people who torture and murder POWs and machine-gun civilians who now want the world to believe that American bombs are wantonly killing innocents on the streets of Baghdad. The Baghdad market bombing was not a misguided missile or bomb. We inventory such things, and one of ours didn't go there. All of those we launched, dropped, or fired are accounted for, and it's pretty clear that none hit the market. The rage at America across the Arab world--which swallowed the Iraqi propaganda whole--is spread across the Arab media, and some in the west. There are two important facts to remember in this: first, these people hated us before the market bombing, and will hate us long after it's forgotten; and second, there is physical evidence that the market was bombed by Iraq to manufacture a claim of American atrocity.
The folks at No Such Agency apparently have a picture of the spot the bombing occurred, and there's one really telling piece of evidence. Or rather, there isn't. There's no crater in the ground. I didn't do very well in college physics, but I am pretty sure that a 500 or 1,000 pound bomb--far less a bigger one--which is falling at several hundred miles an hour, is gonna make a big hole in the ground when it hits, and a much bigger one when it explodes. The crater left by bombs of that size are usually at least ten feet deep and twenty or thirty feet across. In the Baghdad bombings, there are no craters. These bombs were set by the Iraqis on the surface, to kill crowds of their own people, and for the sole purpose of creating propaganda against us. Get used to this. The Iraqis will kill more of their own each day, and try to blame us. That's why we need to be forceful in calling them on it.
We also need to be forceful in telling the world of their lies because some of the media have really gone to the dark side. One company, whose real name you may be able to derive, is now referred to as the "Baghdad Broadcasting Company" by the CENTCOM guys. You can't blame them. In wars against totalitarian regimes, only the good guys get harassed by the free press.
But you can blame the Pentagon character assassins who are now gunning for Big Dog Don Rumsfeld. According to the Washington Post, the Monday edition of that notable defense and foreign policy journal, The New Yorker, is on the attack trying to discredit the war and those who run it. The magazine quotes an unidentified senior Pentagon planner critical of what New Yorker thinks is another Vietnam: "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground." That disloyal nonsense is bad enough in peacetime. But at war, that "senior Pentagon planner" should be fired. And in the defense establishment, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out who the "unidentified senior Pentagon planner" is. He should be fired today, and left to pursue his civilian political ambitions without the rank and title that give credence to his comments.
Iraq now claims that 4,000 Arabs have come to fight for Saddam. The number is a lie, as is everything else coming from the Iraqi "Information" Ministry. Whatever the number is, we know that it doesn't include the 900 Ansar al-Islam terrorists who tried to get into Iraq this morning, and ran into some real soldiers. Ansar al-Islam is a Kurdish Sunni Islamic extremist group which is part of the al Qaeda organization. But they aren't too smart. When they got caught, they broke the first rule in the terrorist playbook: they got into a real fight with real soldiers, not the unarmed civilians they're used to killing. Those who survived fled back into Iran. Others, like the one who ran a pickup truck into a group of American soldiers this morning in Kuwait, won't be that dumb.
These terrorists won't stop us from removing Saddam. Their goal isn't that. They want to control the new Iraq. We have to stop them. And we can, if we act aggressively and use the intelligence that is available in the Middle East, but not in places such as Northern Ireland.
The Brits--who have learned a thing or two there--attacked a terrorist position before dawn today southeast of Basra. The Royal Marine Commandos--some of the best there are--captured an Iraqi colonel and a large cache of weapons including about two dozen SAMs. Very well done, gents. Intelligence makes all the difference. Which is why the Brits' push is part of what they call "Operation James." As in Bond, James Bond.