"Desperate" Iraqi resistance picks off GIs at will

There's been some laughable spin out of Iraq, but none more so than Bremer's assertion that the Iraqi resistance is "desperate" -- as indicated by their increasingly bold and deadly attacks.

Nah, the resistance roams the country at will, doing what it pleases with the US presence and its Iraqi lackeys. Not a sign of desperation, but a sign of confidence. Not good for our servicemembers.

And then Bush, playing his desperado bit, egged on the opposition, "Bring them on" (a taunt now repeated by Gen. Tommy Franks from the safety of his Tampa headquarters). And they've come.

Three more Americans were killed in the last 12 hours. The first was the soldier guarding Baghdad University (though some reports indicate he was engaged in some sort of "community outreach" program). This killing, similar to many recent attacks, give lie to the notion that the Iraqi resistance is "desperate" -- the assailant merely walked up to his target in broad daylight, shot him in public at close range, and casually strolled away as onlookers looked to other way.
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Mortars fired at U.S. troops for first time since war's end

Sunni insurgents have begun launching mortars attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq for the first time since President George Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.

U.S. officials said Sunni insurgents began using mortars in attacks last week. They said the mortar attacks have caused greater damage and casualties than automatic fire or rocket-propelled grenade strikes.
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  thanks to Drudge Report

Say It: This Is a Quagmire
By Tom Hayden

On the day U.S. soldiers occupied Baghdad, draped the American flag over Saddam Hussein's statue and pulled it down, 103 GIs had died in the Iraq war. The number killed since that supposedly triumphal moment on April 9 may double in this coming week, in a war that an American general now admits is ongoing.
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Iraq: the human toll (part two)
As news reporters tracked troops on the road to Baghdad, much of the suffering and loss of ordinary Iraqi civilians was left untold. Until now. Here, in a compelling dispatch, award-winning foreign correspondent Ed Vulliamy goes in search of their stories

The hospital in which Salima Hashem died, where the childless Kassim and his wife lie, and from which Jessica Lynch was rescued, is one of two in Nasiriyah. At the other, the General Surgical Hospital, six o'clock in the evening in the wards on the North Wing would usually have been a quiet time, says Dr Karim Azurgan, an orthopaedic surgeon. 'We would have finished our rounds, with patients getting ready for their evening meal.' But on the night of 24 March, the ward was anything but tranquil. That was the hospital's turn to become the target of two war crimes: one by the Iraqis, with a retort from the Americans. The wing is now a rubble of twisted metal and masonry blown akimbo, with beds and medicine cabinets strewn around.

They were not war patients in here, they were in hospital for normal reasons you would come to hospital for,' says Dr Azurgan. 'But then, of course, those who survived the bombing became war patients.'
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