Soldiers and Equipment Head for Iraq Border in Vast Formation

Following President Bush's 48-hour ultimatum to Mr. Hussein, United States Army and Marine divisions rolled toward the Iraqi frontier today. They formed a broad arc of thousands of vehicles, shoulder to shoulder in a sprawling phalanx facing north and visible to journalists scouting the area.
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Iraq Body Count

This is a Human Security project to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003. Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available on this page and on various IBC counters which may be freely displayed on any website, where they will be automatically updated without further intervention. Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication.
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Kevin Sites|blog

First-person account of a solo journalist's life on the front lines of war.
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Things to Come
by Paul Krugman

Of course we'll win on the battlefield, probably with ease. I'm not a military expert, but I can do the numbers: the most recent U.S. military budget was $400 billion, while Iraq spent only $1.4 billion.

What frightens me is the aftermath — and I'm not just talking about the problems of postwar occupation. I'm worried about what will happen beyond Iraq — in the world at large, and here at home.

The members of the Bush team don't seem bothered by the enormous ill will they have generated in the rest of the world. They seem to believe that other countries will change their minds once they see cheering Iraqis welcome our troops, or that our bombs will shock and awe the whole world (not just the Iraqis) or that what the world thinks doesn't matter. They're wrong on all counts.
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Politicians underestimate Iraq force

Let's take a look at how many soldiers it takes or has taken to keep the peace in some of the world's leading trouble spots. The British Army in 1995 kept 19,000 troops in Northern Ireland to control a population of 1.6 million. That's one soldier for every 84 residents. If a similar ratio were applied to Iraq, the United States and its allies would need an occupation force of 285,000 troops.

In 1995, we had an international force of 60,000 to control the 4 million inhabitants of unhappy Bosnia. At that ratio, we would need 360,000 soldiers to occupy and control Iraq. In Kosovo, 50,000 soldiers now keep the peace among 2 million. Apply that formula to Iraq and you need an occupation force of 600,000.

What Shinseki was, in essence, saying was that unless a sizeable force of allies join us in Iraq, the peacekeeping effort there could employ virtually the entire deployable Army and Marine Corps.

Which, given the state of the world in which we live and the vagaries of North Korea's dear leader Kim Jong Il, not to mention Iraq's neighbors in Iran, is a truly scary scenario.
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Reconstruction reality check
This nation-building is tricky stuff
by Molly Ivins

Q: What is the country most likely to supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorists? A: Russia.

Just thought we ought to keep a grip on reality here. It gets harder when one finds a headline like this on the front page of The Wall Street Journal: "Bush Has an Audacious Plan to Rebuild Iraq Within a Year."

How does he plan to do that? Privatize the job, what else?
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