What I'm really feeling, though, is that the poor, shoeless, malnourished, uneducated 8-year-old girl who we are getting ready to maim or decapitate on a 100, or 10, or 5-to-1 basis doesn't matter nearly as much as the Marine second lieutenant who was the star quarterback on his high school football team in West Virginia.

When you take it to those two extremes, you make an interesting counterpoint. When you look at the average Iraqi citizen and the average soldier, I think there's a different contrast. The life that your average Iraqi citizen lives under Saddam is terrible, and for a country with such a bountiful source of wealth, that's ridiculous. Now, I know America's track record with "building democracies" is rather suspect, but if you at least agree with their intentions, at some point, the average Iraqi citizen will have a more proportionate amount of Iraq's wealth than they currently have. At the very least, humanitarian aid will go to the right people instead of being gobbled up by the Ba'ath party thugs.

So, the idea is that the poor, shoeless, malnourished, uneducated 8-year-old girl will be taken care of. The way the current administration has chosen to attack this problem is by getting rid of Saddam's regime, and, love the plan or hate it, it's a plan. To execute that plan, we've been choosing to be extremely careful to avoid civilian deaths, and, in so doing, may be putting our own troops at a greater risk. Whereas the main reason civilians are at risk is because Iraqi leadership is *placing* them at risk, artificially.

So the crux of my point is that the ultimate responsibility for any civilian casualties lies on those who put the casualties in the line of fire. Yes, it would be our forces who pulled the trigger, but it's the Iraqis that are bringing this war into the cities, placing military targets in civilian areas, and using human shields. We just want to make our way to Baghdad and take out Saddam.

I will stand skeptical on this CNN reporter's statement overall, though "they're ambushing us and shooting our POWs in the head". On the first point, I have been remarking to myself that the term "ambush" seems to have come into a new, liberal usage that smacks of propaganda. On the second, I will wait for more information; the reporter's clear implication is that they were executed -- taken prisoner and then executed. I would say that the 5 poor bastards who could speak to that are not feeling the liberty to do so at this moment. CNN must have an inside source.

Okay, I have to be clear here, in that I was paraphrasing the statements on CNN. I probably was liberal in my paraphrasing. The point being made was that we're trying to save their prisoners' lives, and as evidenced on the tape, they're doing quite the opposite.

Looking at the facts, ambush does smack of propaganda, but in this case, it's not a bad assessment. Faking a surrender is simply unacceptable, and if it continues, our stance on surrender is going to have to change. Right now, our forces have to wait until a weapon is seen and actually POINTED at them before attacking a non-uniformed Iraqi, or a surrendering Iraqi soldier. These are good guidelines IF they're actually surrendering, and IF soldiers are in uniform. But what if someone in civilian clothing "surrenders" and has a bunch of plastic explosive strapped to his chest? This *will* happen at some point, as they become more and more desperate.

Doug took some grief for raising "blitzkrieg" and, while I think the parallels aren't supportable, I'm not sure that our intentions, our optimism, our faith in our PGMs, and our sense of righteousness are going to make much difference to those 5, 10, or 100 innocents if events and Saddam "force our hand" and compel us to act more aggressively to protect that second lieutentant. I think it'll pretty much be all one, big blitzkrieg to them.

Yeah, but after it's over, I think the vast majority who aren't unlucky enough to lose their life will be very comforted in the fact that they can put food on the table. The idea is that after it's over, on average, Iraqis will be better off than they are now. There's a lot of slip between the cup and the lip, but right now, the idea itself isn't all that far-fetched.