If Iraqui forces continue to adopt some of the tactics of "embedding" in communities, somehow fail to heed our calls to cave in, and delay the speedy conclusion of this war in a way that leads to a steady increase in US/UK casualties, I wonder how long it will be before Tommy Franks asks his people to tone it down on the whole S&A/smart bomb thing and we just start shelling the living crap out of various suburbs of Baghdad?

You make a good point in that, at some point, it's going to get really old if we keep losing our boys because we were trying to save a few Iraqi lives. As much as I want to reduce the amount of civilian casualties, it's becoming a lot harder to tell the reds from the whites, and at some point, we definitely are going to have to err on the side of protecting our troops, at the expense of increasing the risk to civilians. In reality, the Iraqis are the ones who aren't fighting this war according to well-understood rules of engagement, therefore any increase in civilian casualties would be their doing.

Or, to say it another more harsh way... I don't want Iraqi civilians to needlessly die, but given the way things have gone with these fake surrenders and non-uniformed combattants, I would gladly trade 100 innocent Iraqi lives to get back one of our combat fatalities. At some point, this effort to spare civilian lives is adding an extreme amount of risk to our own troops' lives.

On another note, they're saying on CNN right now that U.S. Intelligence has it that Republican Guard members have orders to use chemical weapons if the coalition makes it to Baghdad. There's a shock.