This Ha’Aretz article on the military operations notes that no Scuds have been found so far by US forces in Western Iraq, and Israel is downgrading its alert status.

…U.S. Army General Tommy Franks, commander of the allied forces operation in Iraq, said that it was not known whether Iraq still had the capability of firing Scud missiles at countries in the region.

“One doesn’t know whether the regime has the ability to strike any neighboring country with missiles,” Franks said in response to a reporter’s question on Iraqi strikes against Israel, in his first press briefing since the start of the war on Thursday.

No caches of chemical or biological weaponry have been found yet either. When the evidence is finally brandished triumphantly, probably in the face of serious world attention to their glaring absence, will you believe the timing? Even if you actually believe we did go in there to disarm Iraq?

…and I mean that sincerely, George W. Bush. Far be it for me, a sinful man who has backslid more times than Robert Downey Jr., to personally single you and your murderous cohorts out.

I gladly defer to Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama and Jimmy Carter and the Pope, more conversant in things scriptural or theological than I, or any of your unenlightened inner circle, will ever be. I will let them speak the truth, as far as any of us can know it here on this earth. To a person, they condemn your most unholy and unjust of wars in Iraq.” — Alan Bisbort, American Politics Journal

A political system that delivers this disastrous mistake needs reform, says Richard Dawkins: “Osama bin Laden, in his wildest dreams, could hardly have hoped for this. A mere 18 months after he boosted the US to a peak of worldwide sympathy unprecedented since Pearl Harbor, that international goodwill has been squandered to near zero. Bin Laden must be beside himself with glee. And the infidels are now walking right into the Iraq trap.” Guardian/UK

We know Bush Junior is not ready for prime time, but here’s some confirming evidence: We Begin Combing in Five Minutes! (washingtonpost.com) “…(A) technician accidentally flipped a switch that fed the images of a not-ready-for-prime-time Bush — his eyes darting to and fro as a female stylist sprayed, combed and patted down his hair.” Footage was aired on BBC-TV, CBS and another British channel. “A BBC spokeswoman told us that her network promptly realized the video was not for broadcast ‘but they couldn’t pull away because of technical difficulties.’ ” Was this done on purpose? A fuming White House, insisting the footage was “unauthorized”, seemingly thinks so. A senior official observes that ‘…this kind of thing has happened more than once…’ and insists that from now on it will be Presidential staffers rather than network personnel who flick the switch turning on the feed at Bush’s press conferences. Washington Post

Sydney Morning Herald coverage of the ground war makes note of conflicting reports suggesting that US forces are using napalm as they advance into Iraq. Napalm is illegal under a 1980 United Nations convention. But then we don’t have any truck with what the UN wants anymore, do we?

Hundreds of thousands of peace marchers – as many as 700,000, according to organisers as they totted up the numbers mid-afternoon, but police insisted it was under 100,000, and even CND put the numbers just at 150,000 – were swarming past him; and, though the weather may have been markedly warmer than that which greeted the phenomenon that was the 15 February march, hearts were colder.

Britain’s biggest wartime demonstration was a more dour, determined and altogether angrier affair. Gone, it seemed, were the ranks of the well-dressed middle-classes, most of whom had been holding a placard for the first time, who swelled the first event to such historic proportions. Instead, the more bizarre groupings and banners (South London Home Educators; Sex Workers of the World Unite – and, yes, you can bet that heads were craning to see who was holding the poster) were almost lost in the sea of CND, SWP and Socialist Alliance posters, and their messages were not the stuff of musical comedy. ‘Weep with the Widows of Iraq.’ ‘Bomb Texas, they have oil too.’ The Workers’ Revolutionary Party Young Socialists, in particular, built a number of bridges with the rest of the nation by carrying the simple, pithy, ‘Victory to Iraq.’ Guardian/UK

Related: Global Day of Protest Against War on Iraq — A 200K poster in PDF format “listing the 603 cities, on all seven continents, that held protests on F15, along with crowd estimates for many of the largest turnouts.” [via monkeyfist]

And why in the world, in articles like this, does the New York Times keep saying “thousands of protesters” when it is talking about hundreds of thousands… two orders of magnitude greater?

The Heavy Price of Dominance: “Americans — whether they support or oppose war with Iraq — need to realize the consequences of the status we may shortly assume … the beginning of empire.” — Leon Fuerth, formerly national security adviser to vice president Al Gore and now a research professor at George Washington University. TomPaine

In a little-used U.N. legal procedure, any nation can by-pass logjams in the Security Council and take an issue directly to the General Assembly. Has the time come for the GA to vote to condemn the Iraq War as a breach of international peace and security? Globalvision News Network

What are the military options for Iraq? How will the US deploy their firepower? What is the likelihood of street battles in Baghdad? Paul Hirst, the author of War in the Twenty-First Century, assesses the options. open democracy

I was prepared to hear about a grenade attack at a US military camp in Kuwait but floored to hear that an American soldier is the prime may be a suspect. CNN

While of course the suspect may be mentally unstable and not a principled objector, the followng links are offered as Related: Not in a soldier’s name: Interviewed by television crews in the desert, the officers and men on the frontiers of Iraq put a brave face on it all. “We’re here to do a job.” But killing, and being killed, isn’t just a job. At least, some of them know it. Once in the service, it is very, very hard to quit. Comradeship is no mean virtue.

But in the US, it has become an issue. The Quakers, in North Carolina, have established a hotline to counsel disturbed members of the armed services. It is much in demand. Many Americans are devout Christians. Do they listen to church leaders, or do they follow their fundamentalist president, who still believes in crusades? It is tragic and ironic that Christian fundamentalism plays unwittingly into the hands of the Islamic fundamentalism it purports to despise. Guardian/UK

And: “A few in military refuse to fight ‘wrong war’. Activists call stance brave; critics say it’s cowardly.” USAToday

So Are You. Americans are not often afforded the opportunity to witness a war crime live on television. Today’s actions bring to mind a war crime from a generation ago: The shooting of a prisoner by Vietnamese General and American ally Nguyen Ngoc Loan. General Loan put a pistol to the head of this bound prisoner and blew his brains into the street, an image that millions of Americans saw after it had taken place. We are here again today. The poverty of the Iraqi people leaves them bound, unable to escape the wave of steel. We have blown their brains out. We have incinerated them in place. We will continue to do so, and you can watch it from your couch. Today, you are the terrorist. — William Rivers Pitt, truthout

but he was right about Saddam Paul Berman, one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East.
(…)
Terror and Liberalism, Berman’s bracing new book, suggests that just as liberal-minded Europeans and Americans doubted the threats of Hitler and Stalin, enlightened Westerners today are in danger of missing the urgency of the violent ideologies coming out of the Muslim world.

The argument put forward by Berman, who is one of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America’s New Left, will both infuriate and engage those on all sides of the political spectrum. In a recent interview with Salon, Berman insisted that while he does not support the Bush administration — actually, he detests how President Bush has handled the case for war and warns “we will pay for it” — he thinks it was also dangerous for the antiwar movement to ignore the threat that was posed by a ruthless Iraqi regime that killed a million people and threatened the stability of the world. ”

So you think the way he’s presenting this war to the world is really where he’s gone wrong.

Yes, it has been wretched. He’s presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He’s certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can’t understand his reasoning. He’s aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he’s made good arguments, he’s made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.

In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do — overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons — is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It’s a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We’re going to pay for this.

Then what is it that the public doesn’t understand? What hasn’t he been able to get across?

One thing he hasn’t gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there’s ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There’s every reason to think that Saddam, who’s used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.

Do you believe Bush has such motives?

It’s not right to utterly dismiss these motives. A lot of people look at Bush and sneer a little too easily and think that these motives cannot possibly have anything to do with him or his policies. This is a mistake too.

In Afghanistan, everybody sneers at the achievements of the United States and its allies because we see the warlords in the provinces, we see the extreme suffering, we see all the things that haven’t been done. But what has been done has really been quite magnificent. A hideous tyranny was overthrown, a new government was established in more or less the way that any liberal democrat would advise: Afghans were consulted from around the country, more or less democratic councils led to the forming of a new government with a new leader for Afghanistan who is not a warlord or a corrupt figure or a friendly religious fanatic but who is in fact a man of modern liberal democratic ideals.

Bush announced that the war in Afghanistan was going to be fought on behalf of women’s rights. Everybody deeply laughed at that and for reasons I can understand because in the United States Bush has not been a promoter of women’s rights. Still, the result of the war was in fact that women’s rights in Afghanistan have made a forward leap larger than anywhere in the world in history. From a certain point of view this has been the first feminist war in all of history.

He’s unable to do that partly because the man is fatally inarticulate and he’s also unable to do that, I’m sure, because he’s confused ideologically about whether he’s really in favor of the do-good aspect of his program or indifferent to it.

He hasn’t given us much of an indication that he’s preoccupied with these humanitarian issues. Maybe he simply isn’t.

He hasn’t straightened it out in his mind. His initial instinct was to oppose this sort of thing. He was against nation-building. Events have driven him to engage in nation-building, but he’s done it in a halfhearted way. Although he’s done some of these things which are admirable, he has not been able to enlist the world’s sympathy or support. He’s left people all over the world in a position where they have no way to regard his motives as anything other than the most cynical.

But I should add that although Bush is hugely to blame for this — it’s just tragic that the United States is led by such an inarticulate and intellectually confused and unattractive figure who personally makes me cringe — other people should be standing up and trying to fight for issues of humanitarianism and social solidarity, of women’s rights and liberal freedoms.

One of the scandals is that we’ve had millions of people marching through the streets calling for no war in Iraq, but we haven’t had millions of people marching in the streets calling for freedom in Iraq. Nobody’s marching in the streets on behalf of Kurdish liberties. The interests of the liberal dissidents of Iraq and the Kurdish democrats are in fact also our interests. The more those people prosper, the safer we are. This is a moment in which what should be our ideals — the ideals of liberal democracy and social solidarity — are also materially in our interest. Bush has failed to articulate this, and a large part of the left has failed to see this entirely.

Salon Books

Tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine has a profile by Berman of Sayyid Qutb, whom he dubs <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html?pagewanted=all&position=top%20%20

“>The Philosopher of Islamic Terror and ideological hero of al Qaeda. [thanks, walker]