If you think we don't have enough troops in Iraq now — which we don't — wait and see if the factions there start going at each other. America would have to bring back the draft to deploy enough troops to separate the parties.

``The exact target would have been disclosed to them by Jaish headquarters a short time before the actual strike,'' he told reporters.

His apparent aim was to deter his enemies and boost his prestige at home and in the Arab world, which would help to explain why the West has failed to find WMD in Iraq so far, despite the conviction that it existed.

raggie: 'I wrote fawning letters, I lied, I led people up the garden path. That is a problem that war correspondents have. A large amount of work we do is hidden from the public and does not always stand up to scrutiny.'

The police said they had arrested 19 suspects, including two Kuwaitis, six Jordanians and unspecified numbers of Saudis and Iraqis. They were "all committed to al-Qa'ida" said a spokesman. But no sooner had the police made their claim than the Governor of Najaf said that only six suspects were under arrest, and that they were all Iraqi.

When we discovered that the highest officials in the United States not only knew 9/11 was going to happen (and that is a certainty with thousands of footnotes), but profited mightily from that knowledge, this revelation could have offered a tremendous window into the political behavior of the American nation. And in analyzing that political behavior, we could have seen how throughout the 20th century—and for some years before that—it has been the movers and shakers in the United States who have engineered all the wars, all for the profit of those cagey industrialists, bankers and investors who saw monstrous profits to be made by fomenting strife and furnishing the methods and opportunities to reap them.

George W. Bush recently embarrassed himself and all Americans by claiming at a forum in Israel that it was God who had commanded him to smite the Afghanis and the Iraqis, and now he was going to do it again

Murdoch repeated his standard claim that his news organizations always strove to be "fair and balanced." Then could he explain the fact that radio had 300-plus hours of nationally syndicated conservative talk each week, versus five hours of liberal talk?
"Yes," Murdoch said with a twinkle. "Apparently, conservative talk is more popular."

"Our republic and its press will rise or fall together," Joseph Pulitzer wrote in 1904

the age-old dream of ideal war—war in which the other side quits after a minimum of fighting.
To its supporters this seemed quite an elegant idea: a limited approach to war in pursuit of a limited goal, with limited casualties on both sides. It was to be a rational war, and bombing was to serve as the chief instrument of rationality.

All told, American warplanes dropped nearly eight million tons of bombs on an area about a third the size of France—four times the amount dropped in World War II and seventeen times the amount dropped in the Korean War.

In an effort far more ambitious than that during World War II, and even given great advances in U.S. technology, bombing had once again proved to be indecisive. War could not be won by air alone. Air power could not break an enemy.

"To nationalists, shared blood is everything: for them, history is made in bed. Biology is the test of their ideas, and usually it proves them wrong."