“This is just a scene from hell here. All the vehicles on fire. There are bodies burning around me, there are bodies lying around, there are bits of bodies on the ground. This is a really bad own goal by the Americans.
“We don’t really know how many Americans are dead. There is ammunition exploding in fact from some of these cars. A very senior member of the Kurdish Republic’s government who also may have been injured.”
So goes the satellite report from BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson, who was accompanying a convoy of US special forces and Kurdish fighters when it came under attack from an American warplane. Read here for the whole story.
You can hear and listen to the actual satellite report here.

That’s what one of the signs said at the rally on behalf of Mike Hawash (who is being “detained” without due process) in Portland Oregon this morning. See b!X Portland Communique for photos and report.
STOP BUSH BEFORE HE MAKES CRIMINALS OF US ALL. (Another rally sign.)

Eric Blumrich has put together some very disturbing-because-true Flash pieces on his website.
Check out “War Crimes,” and make sure your stomach is empty before you watch “The Evil Is With Us Today.” “Dr. Bushlove” might be funny if it weren’t so scary.
Thanks to a post on Blogs Against War for the link to Blumrich.

I’m grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper’s, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven’t been nearly as receptive, says George McGovern in his Nation-published scathing analysis of Bush’s bad leadership.
He begins with
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation’s true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
And he goes on to explain in detail. Don’t miss it.
(Being notoriously irreligious, I love this particular statement of his:
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God’s hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis–all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God’s will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice–and other sideline warriors–are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.)

“People say this doesn’t happen in this country,” McGeady said, “but one of my neighbors has been disappeared. It’s not what he might have done that matters to me — they disappeared him. They need to question him and let him go, or charge him. It’s like Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka.”
From Wired News via Blog Sister Lauren, who posts and links relevantly about her disillusionment with America and ends her post with this:
Perhaps singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco said it best: “And if I hear one more time about a fool’s right to his tools of rage, I’m gonna take all my friends, and I’m going to move to Canada, and we’re going to die of old age.”
Meanwhile, as the Wired article reports, friends of the disappeared Portland Intel programmer and American citizen Mike Hawash (who has not been charged with any crime) have set up a web site to support his release. B!X, who lives in Portland, was at the rally today for Hawash and will be posting something about it.
During the Viet Nam War we used to joke about gathering all of our like-minded friends at our hill-top home and seceding our 1 1/2 acres from the Union. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

An insightful piece by Marina Ottaway (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace/ Democracy and Rule of Law Project) begins with:
The war in Iraq will undoubtedly result in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his regime.
But the ensuing political reconstruction will probably not result in the transformation of Iraq into a democratic country, nor will it lead to a wave of democratic change sweeping the entire Middle East.
The reason is simple.
The United States cannot shock and awe Iraqis into accepting a new political system, nor can it impose one with force once the occupation ends. The ultimate outcome of political reconstruction depends on the Iraqis: If the different ethnic, religious, tribal and political factions can reach enough agreement on the outline of a new political system, the country may eventually develop into a democracy. If they cannot, the country will sink into chaos or turn to another strongman for stability after the occupation.
And it ends with:
The example of Bahrain is a case in point. Under a new constitution that does not in any way limit the power of the king, Bahrain a few months ago held elections for half the members of a rather powerless parliament; the remaining members are appointed by the king. Despite the obvious limitations of the exercise, the United States chose to praise Bahrain warmly for its progress toward democracy.
The United States enjoys immense military superiority, but it does not have a comparable advantage in the political arena. The political future of Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries will be determined more by their domestic politics than by U.S. policy.
In between are cogent comparisons of the politics of post-WW II Germany and Japan and post-war Middle East countries, pointing out the reasons why democratization is not likely to work in Iraq.
We will have gotten rid of the Hussein regime, which is good. But that

I do love it when I find support for my position among women a whole lot smarter than I am.
The war’s consequences on feminism and the international community were the focus of a panel discussion held at Cornell University on March 25.
The opening speaker addressed the positions of organizations such as Code Pink, which confronts “war as a women’s issue.” Code Pink claims that current ideologies of international politics are poisoned because they are “dominated by testosterone and a military which engenders a culture of aggression.”
[Pardon me, but wooo hooo. Wasn’t that what I was just recently saying??]
The five panelists were Prof. Marcia Greenberg, law; Jane Marie Law, the H. Stanley Krushen Professor of World Religions; Prof. Andrea Parrot, policy analysis and management; Prof. Anna Marie Smith, government and Christine Cuomo, Society for the Humanities postdoctoral fellow.

We will continue to fight to protect our rights as American citizens and the rights of all people worldwide to live in peace. This is what democracy looks like.
This is the final statement of a letter from a member of Women Against War that I posted. It deserves repeating because the message tends to get lost in the confusing “support the troops; oppose the war” rhetoric.
We must continue to “fight” for peace — not with physical force, but with open, public, non-violent, articulate protest. We must fight by becoming involved in trying to affect local policies and politics. We must fight with more than peaceful words; we fight with non-violent actions. While words have power, until that power is used to craft and implement intelligent action, the power of words is simply potential.
We must continue to “fight” with protests that are peaceful, orderly, organized, and informed. If the choice is made for civil disobedience, it must be made recognizing that there are consequences to breaking the law. We must continue the widespread sharing of both factual and personally-experienced information from around the world; this kind of information is fundamental to empowering the ordinary citizen to understand his/her choices and to make those choices only after critical and compassionate analysis and discussion.
That is how we fight we for freedom — by modeling democratic methods. That’s what will change the world into a planet of collaborating democracies. Not war. Not physical force. Not propaganda. Not even intellectual arguments. But by modeling — both individually and nationally — what we expect others to emulate.
This is what democracy looks like.

SOUTHEAST OF BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A U.S. Marine commander said on Saturday American troops would use overwhelming force to crush any resistance if ordered to storm Baghdad and that the battle would cost many civilian lives.
Marines say there are signs that much of the Iraqi military has decided to give up, but U.S.-led forces are ready if necessary to take on a bloody house-to-house fight for control of the capital.
“We’re not going to tip-toe into the city, it will be a forceful knock-out punch every time we go in,” said U.S. Marine Captain Matt Watt, commander of Lima Company, a unit of mechanized infantry trained in urban warfare.
“We’ll make sure there’s no capability for the enemy to resist us, we’ll go in shooting up every time,” he told Reuters.
“We have to go in forcefully, and when we go in forcefully it just creates a lot of collateral damage.”
Boy, those Iraqis sure make our soldiers do terrible things, don’t they?