>The advance units are in now because, unlike the 1991 Gulf War, military
>planners don't want the ground assault to wait until after a prolonged air
>offensive; they want a swift ground occupation of most of the country to
>undercut antiwar sentiment, and to secure major oil fields.
Interesting if anti-war sentiment could have the tiniest effect on this war. Opposition to the imperialist cynicism of high level bombing and failure to minimise civilian casualties was a major factor in opposition to the Kosova war, which had a better moral case than the present war.
Presumably one game plan if the US proudly refuses to submit a resolution to the Security Council which gets defeated, is to intensify these covert war activities.
But if they bombed the defences of the Al-Ansar radical islamic enclave to allow the broadly democratic Kurds to overrun it, then half of all the circumstantial evidence that Iraq has anything to do with global terrorism, will have been resolved. Why the need for a full scale war for regime change, if the Iraqi regime becomes like Yemen, acquiescing in under cover terrorising the terrorist squads. Indeed would Iraq look very different from Pakistan in terms of justification for a full war?
Humour and irony has been devastating in the UK in undermining Blair's position. Can the US peace movement not unpick the bombast of Bush's claims to patriotism?
Chris Burford
London