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

The Times: US Marines turn fire on civilians

THE light was a strange yellowy grey and the wind was coming up, the beginnings of a sandstorm. The silence felt almost eerie after a night of shooting so intense it hurt the eardrums and shattered the nerves. My footsteps felt heavy on the hot, dusty asphalt as I walked slowly towards the bridge at Nasiriya. A horrific scene lay ahead.

Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan and a couple of trucks, blocked the road. They were riddled with bullet holes. Some had caught fire and turned into piles of black twisted metal. Others were still burning.

Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy artillery.

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.
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  thanks to also not found in nature

Robert Fisk: Sergeant's suicidal act of war has struck fear into Allied hearts

Sergeant Ali Jaffar Moussa Hamadi al-Nomani was the first Iraqi combatant known to stage a suicide attack. Not even during the uprising against British rule did an Iraqi kill himself to destroy his enemies.
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Robert Fisk: A quiet Baghdad night of occasional air raid sirens and mysterious explosions

On the roof of the al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, you could hear the missile coming. It swooped down out of the clouds of smoke south of the Tigris, hissed past the office and disappeared over the old Ahrar bridge. "Was that what I think it was?" the anchorman asked me down the line from Doha. Ah yes, indeed. It was one of those days. A few minutes later, chatting to the al-Jazeera staff in their waterfront villa, an old colonial home with wooden bannisters and beautifully crafted blue-and-white patterned floor tiles, came the sound of supersonic jets.
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The 'Palestinization' of Iraq

To date, an estimated 5,200 Iraqis have crossed the Jordanian-Iraqi border, going back "to defend their homeland" as they invariably put it. In already one week of a war that was marketed by the Pentagon as "clean" and "quick" and which is revealing itself to be bloody and protracted, not a single Iraqi refugee has crossed the al-Karama border point into eastern Jordan.
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  thanks to thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse

Back Off, Syria and Iran!

We're shocked that the enemy forces don't observe the rules of war. We're shocked that it's hard to tell civilians from combatants, and friends from foes. Adversaries use guerrilla tactics; they are irregulars; they take advantage of the hostile local weather and terrain; they refuse to stay in uniform. Golly, as our secretary of war likes to say, it's unfair.

Some of their soldiers are mere children. We know we have overwhelming, superior power, yet we can't use it all. We're stunned to discover that the local population treats our well-armed high-tech troops like invaders.

Why is all this a surprise again? I know our hawks avoided serving in Vietnam, but didn't they, like, read about it?
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A lot of people don't really understand how much money is at stake with the Iraq "crusade". This diagram could help you to understand what the USA is doing, and what are it's main goals.

Read the small print: the US wants to privatise Iraq's oil
No one here believes this is a humanitarian war

Search for smoking gun draws a blank
US and Britain's case for war undermined by special forces' failure to find illegal arms at 10 suspected sites

Outrage Spreads in Arab World
Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Market Called a 'Massacre'

Combat in Iraq

Apart from committing serious violations of international law which will undoubtedly result in war crimes charges, the governments responsible for ordering these people to invade Iraq have also sentenced them to numerous unsavoury futures as a result of extended and extreme exposure to depleted uranium: slow and painful death; strange incurable cancers; and horrendous disabilities for hundreds of thousands of children born to those who are able to have children, or at least who manage to have children before they are rendered unable to reproduce from the effects of the enormous amounts of depleted uranium deposited in Southern Iraq during and since the Gulf War.
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Generals dig in for long war
Assault on Baghdad put off for weeks

Two Arab news sites:

Al-Jazeerah

Arab News