Turks Add A Hurdle To U.S. War Plans
Airspace Use to Require Parliamentary Approval

Hardening their position, Turkey's leaders insist they need further assurances about postwar Iraq before they allow U.S. troops to deploy along the border for an attack. In a new complication, they also are refusing to let the Pentagon use Turkish airspace without approval from parliament. (...)

Turkey's reluctance to grant the United States permission to use its airspace is particularly problematic for the Pentagon, which had counted on using scores of warplanes based at Incirlik air base in southern Turkey and on aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean to hit Iraqi targets. Without the use of Turkish airspace, Pentagon officials would have to consider using the more provocative route of flying over Israel and Jordan.

In addition, U.S. military planners had hoped to fly troops directly into northern Iraq as a back-up plan if Turkey refused to let the Army's 4th Infantry Division cross the Iraqi border. Dozens of U.S. ships carrying the division's tanks and heavy equipment have been waiting in Turkish waters for permission to begin unloading.
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  thanks to daily KOS

Bombs and Blood
by Bob Herbert

They seemed like very nice people, the men and women, some with children, who dropped by to see the Liberty Bell, which is housed in a one-story shedlike pavilion with large windows in the roof.

My mind wandering, I imagined the visitors as casualties of war. I glanced up at the sunlight streaming through the roof and could visualize an incoming warhead, a missile that perhaps had strayed off course and was heading toward us. It wasn't hard to imagine the damage. The pavilion and everyone in it would be obliterated.
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Allied Troops Prepare for Gulf Heat

Fierce winds swept across desert camps near the Iraqi border Wednesday, enveloping soldiers in blinding clouds of sand and rattling tents like a drumroll.

And weatherwise, the worst is yet to come.
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  thanks to Drudge Report

For Army, Fears of Postwar Strife
Iraq's Historic Factions May Severely Test a U.S. Occupying Force

The U.S. Army is bracing both for war in Iraq and a postwar occupation that could tie up two to three Army divisions in an open-ended mission that would strain the all-volunteer force and put soldiers in the midst of warring ethnic and religious factions, Army officers and other senior defense officials say.

While the officers believe a decade of peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans and now Afghanistan makes the Army uniquely qualified for the job, they fear that bringing democracy and stability to Iraq may be an impossible task.
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  thanks to Tapped

Just the Beginning
Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world?

For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration's hawks, especially the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war, see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into conflict with several states in the Middle East. Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken.
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Mike Golby is on a roll...

The Armchair Admiral

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point-the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.
Thomas P.M. Barnett [Rentboy Third Class, Naval War College, Newport, RI]

Now that the latest scourge of all that is fine, decent, and upstanding has crawled out from under its rock to sell war to the masses, what is the American left going to do to rein in the sick and depraved bastards running the U.S. and the globe into a black hole the size of George W. Bush's hollow skull? Huh? Of all the low-down, cheap-jack, bottom-feeding scum suckers I've read touting wall-to-wall war for couch potatoes and the Bush administration, 'Professor' Thomas P.M. 'Pom-Pom' Barnett takes the cake.
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