The Day of the Jackals
By Arundhati Roy

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words?

And now the bombs have fallen, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilization. On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawled colorful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse.

A building went down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loved a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.

On March 21 – the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq – an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private A.J. said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11, 2001, attacks. Private A.J. stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said.
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... And The Truth The Victors Refuse To See
Mr Blair Paid a Flying Visit Last Week; Next Week it’s the Turn of President Bush. Reporting from Baghdad, Robert Fisk Suggests an Itinerary That Would Open Their Eyes to What’s Really Going on in Iraq

Iraqis, it now seems certain, are to be blessed this week with a visit from their Liberator-in-Chief, George Bush Jr. While Washington has been avoiding all mention of the trip, the new Iraqi newspapers - one of the few positive results of “liberation” here - have been happily speculating for days on Bush’s arrival.

And we all know what the American President would like to do when he arrives: to be filmed inspecting Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the purported reason for the Anglo-American invasion illegally launched against Iraq. The problem, of course, is that there don’t appear to be any.

So how will the Bush public relations boys manage this particular piece of theatre? Here’s an idea of what they are preparing, the stage-managed “victory” tour of George W Bush. But first, this is what the President should be doing if he really wants to understand the epic crisis that now confronts the nation he was so keen to “liberate”.

First, join a gas queue. George Bush will help to push his limousine to the back of the three-mile petrol line by the Hussein bridge - many motorists run dry before they reach the queue - and here he will wait ... and wait and wait. Eight hours if he’s lucky, maybe 12. Maybe 24.
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Rats are jumping ship

Boy, we've gone from expecting flower-throwing cheering throngs to shoving rifle barrels down the throats of passing motorists.

But please don't blame the troops. They have been placed in an untenable position by the Pentagon's Chickenhawk cabal.

The Pentagon Brass executed a brilliant war (helped, it turned out, by bucketloads of the best weapon in the US arsenal -- CASH), but now it must be forced to pacify a restless and hostile nation. And the more Americans die, the worse the situation becomes.
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That picture must be of one of those Iraqi's enjoying their new found freedom.

Few Iraqis Turning Weapons Over to U.S.

  thanks to Whiskey Bar

Iraq war looking less like a success
Bush's advisers fear questions for which they have no answers.

  thanks to Whiskey Bar

Post-war Baghdad a city in chaos
As security, services lag, anger over occupation grows

U.S. Increases Role in Picking Iraqi Leaders
Plans for a national conference are scrapped. Instead, the coalition will assemble a council to work quickly toward an interim government.

Personal Voices: Kilroy's Still Here
By Sean Penn