Staffers at Nour Hospital in Baghdad wheel out Muslim Naama, 19, after surgery to remove shrapnel lodged in his abdomen as a result of the marketplace blast. “I don’t remember so many injured people, so much blood everywhere, in this hospital before,” a doctor said. “Even doctors and nurses were shocked.”

For a continous war update see: The Agonist
For analysis see: dailyKOS
For a blog of an unembedded journalist: Back to Iraq 2.0

BushCo Wants You Stupefied
Please remain mesmerized by grainy live footage, ignore appalling larger schemes. Thank you

This is not the time to get complacent and lazy and reactionary and wallow in ennui and sadness and bourbon-fueled fatalism, the sense that all is hurling down the road to hell in a hot Republican-drenched handbasket. Tempting as that is.

This is not the time to be all shrugging and dismissive and think whelp, that's it then, nothing we can really do anymore, just sit back and watch the carnage I guess, the switch has been thrown and the snarling war machine is churning in high gear and the mass herd is mewling and subdued and misled and aggro and stupefied.

And therefore you can only sit there and guzzle your scotch and go numb and sigh, flip around to see which frantic network has the best video of windblown reporters riding high on U.S. tanks and yelling about food shortages and lack of sleep as they rumble nobly through the desert.

This is not the time to get thoughtless and simpleminded. The trigger has indeed been tripped and we are right this minute slaughtering thousands in Iraq and dozens of US soldiers are being killed by Bush's "peaceful" order and ooh look, stray bullets and raging dust storms and bedraggled reporters tagging along, all wide-eyed and chaotic and no one really having any idea what, exactly, is really happening.
[more]

‘So Much Blood Everywhere’
A Baghdad hospital is overwhelmed after a missile hits an outdoor market, killing dozens.

Hearts and Minds
by Nicholas D. Kristof

With Americans and Iraqis killing each other just north of here and many of my friends at risk, I've been pained by some e-mail that has trickled over my laptop computer.

Some of it came from an old Egyptian friend, Ikram Youssef, a Harvard-educated scholar who has a natural empathy for the United States — and since he once lived in Kuwait, a rich understanding that Saddam Hussein is a monster. Yet Professor Youssef hopes that this war will end with an Iraqi victory over America.

"I certainly hope that this campaign will fail," he declared. And when even a thoughtful internationalist like Professor Youssef is siding with Saddam's army against America, I want to leap out of my hotel window.
[more]

Raw, Devastating Realities That Expose the Truth About Basra
by Robert Fisk

Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, a small Iraqi girl – victim of an Anglo American air strike – is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a terribly wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress.

An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq's second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape – filmed over the past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad – is raw, painful, devastating.
[more]

The War in Iraq Turns Ugly. That's What Wars Do.

This campaign was begun, like so many others throughout history, with lofty exhortations from battlefield commanders to their troops, urging courage, patience, compassion for the Iraqi people and even chivalry. Within a week it had degenerated into an unexpected ugliness in virtually every populated area where American and British forces have come under fire. Those who believed from intelligence reports and Pentagon war planners that the Iraqi people, and particularly those from the Shiite sections of the southeast, would rise up to greet them as liberators were instead faced with persistent resistance.
[more]

A Disaster Unfolding in Iraq

One would have thought Washington had learned from the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco that you can't really trust exiles who assure you that their people will greet you enthusiastically as liberators and rise up against the regime. Despite optimistic predictions, there have thus far been no mass defections of Iraqi soldiers, there have been no spontaneous uprisings against Saddam Hussein and U.S. and British soldiers attempting to enter Iraqi cities have been met not by cheers and flowers but by bullets and grenades.
[more]

Bush's Peril: Shifting Sand and Fickle Opinion

Pause in Baghdad advance

A four to six day pause in the advance on Baghdad is planned, according to an unnamed US military officer quoted by Reuters.

With American and British troops drawing close to the Iraqi capital, it is reported that the US commanders will call a halt in the advance in order to bring in supplies and reinforcements.
[more]

Iraqi Suicide Bomber Kills 4 U.S. Troops

A bomber identified as a noncommissioned Iraqi army officer killed four American soldiers Saturday, and Iraq threatened more such suicide attacks. Coalition forces pounded Republican Guard positions in preparation for an all-out push toward Baghdad.
[more]

Prepare for the war, and occupation that follows, to look like Lebanon in the 80s and Palestine today.

Standing Up to Uncle Sam
by Naomi Klein

The Gulf War: Secret History

This extensive history of the first Gulf War by William M. Arkin draws on lots of declassified documents and inside information to present previously unknown facts about that conflict. It was published in installments on the Website of the magazine Stars and Stripes (a privately-owned magazine, not the US military newspaper of the same name). At some point the Website disappeared and with it, unfortunately, went this important piece of work. A full copy had survived in the Internet Archive until just a week ago. Now that it has completely vanished from the Net, The Memory Hole is extremely pleased to resurrect it.
[more]

  thanks to BookNotes

The Priority Here is Clear: Oil Comes Before People

Thomas L. Friedman: How to know if the U.S. is winning

(3) Has America been able to explain why some Iraqi forces are putting up such a fierce fight? Are these the most elite, pampered Special Republican Guard units, who have benefited most from Saddam's rule and are therefore willing to fight to preserve it? Or are these primarily Sunni Muslim units, terrified that with the fall of Saddam the long reign of the Sunnis of Iraq will end and they will be replaced by the Shiite majority? Or is this happening because even Iraqis who detest Saddam love their homeland and hate the idea of a U.S. occupation - and these Iraqis are ready to resist a foreign occupier, even one that claims to be a liberator? Knowing the answer is critical for how America reconstructs Iraq. It is not at all unusual for Arabs to detest both their own dictator and a foreign occupier. (See encyclopedia for Israel, invasion of Lebanon, 1982.)
[more]