THIS FRENCH WARSHIP suffered from a daring chicken-feather attack sponsored by the U.K. Sun.

I HAVE TO GET READY FOR CLASS. Go read Lileks:

The BBC (about which I will say more later) is reporting that the mood at CentCom is morose and dispirited; I get the impression that Tommy Frank has retired to his bunk in tears, and most of the officers are are 24-hour suicide watch. Ten Marines dead. No one expected that. The plans called for zero casualties, after all. This changes everything. Rip up the war plan.

At Normandy ten men died every second. Up and down the coast. All the damn day long.

Apparently, Tommy Franks isn’t watching the BBC. Then there’s this report:

While the fighting has become fiercer than expected in parts of the country, our unit has made rapid headway.

In one instance a U.S. army vehicle ran over a pile of machine guns abandoned on the roadside.

For many kilometres, civilians and soldiers were lined up, waving and blowing kisses at the passing vehicles holding U.S. Marines. Many begged for food. Each U.S. vehicle had been given two boxes of ready-to-eat rations suitable for Muslims. Some people came back for seconds, hiding the food they had already collected.

For their part, the U.S. troops were amazed at the Iraqi soldiers’ behaviour.

“Canteens, grenades, abandoned positions — they even left the Iraqi flag in place before they retreated,” said 1st Sergeant Miguel Pares, a New Yorker from Spanish Harlem and the top enlisted man in Bravo company, 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division.

“I wanted that flag so bad but we had to continue moving along.”

Guess 1st Sgt. Pares hasn’t been watching The Beeb either. Or maybe he has, and that’s why he’s “amazed.” Meanwhile, despite the negative coverage, coalition forces are somehow only sixty miles from Baghdad. This is a war that’s going badly?

CLAYTON CRAMER WRITES on the costs of waging war by moral means. It’s a point that seems under-appreciated.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE FROM THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE on French and German state television and its efforts — often unsuccessful — to match government positions:

Whatever the ephemeral nature of being right for a moment or two in a war of continuous and instant changes – the Allies’ problems were misunderstandings “not misinformation or disinformation” said BBC’s man in Doha, Nick Gowing – the French studios seemed committed to a wish or a will to assert that most everything on the American side was going awry.

This version of the French Touch meant at least one comic collision between a field reporter’s version of events and the editorial line in Paris, and one occasion when another station explained away a rival’s images of Iraqi civilian misery.

On the main midday news on Saturday, the private broadcaster TF1, after reporting that the Americans falsely announced they held the port at Umm Qasr, Claire Chazal, a news presenter, called in a report from Jean-Claude Ferey, who was there. Uhh, he said, no doubt about it, they’re in Umm Qasr. But it’s the British not the Americans. And, Ferey explained, he had just talked to the commander, who said they’re going to avoid engaging in Basra, and let it fall when it was time.

TF1 viewers also got a closeup shot of a child with a bandaged head screaming with fear in Baghdad hospital. At virtually the same moment, France 2’s audience saw a much wider angle showing the child in a hospital room filled with newsmen, lights, and microphones and the station’s reporter – beware of reporters actually on the scene – saying that the child was screaming in terror at the commotion in what was an Iraqi propaganda set up.

The Iraqis’ report of only three dead after the first night of bombing almost seemed to enrage a man called Patrick Hesters commenting early Saturday evening from the set of France 3, another state-run network which began its noon to 2 p.m. segment on Friday, after the first American raid, with footage of anti-war demonstrations.

Read the whole thing. I wonder how much anti-American sentiment worldwide is the product of slant at state-controlled or -subsidized media operations?

(Via Judicious Asininity).

VIRGINIA POSTREL responds to those doom-laden reporters who say that the war is going to be longer than “some people” expected:

Who are these “some Americans” who expected a war shorter, and with fewer casualties, than the L.A. riots? . . .

Yes, we’re all more optimistic than we were before the Persian Gulf War, which began with post-Vietnam fears of tens of thousands of Americans dead and years of brutal fighting. But optimism is merely relative. And “less than three months” is not “less than three days.”

What we saw today was that this is a real war. Nasty, brutal, and we can only hope, short. All we’ve been promised is victory—and that’s a promise, among other things, to persist when things get tough.

Indeed. It seems to me that it was the media who were declaring the war won on Friday night, only to declare it lost by Sunday. We saw the same kind of thing with Afghanistan, of course.

UPDATE: People seem to get this. Antiwar protests in Britain are shrinking, according to this report:

The turnout was smaller than last month’s rally by about 1 million people, a diverse gathering that included many first-time protesters. By contrast, Saturday’s crowds consisted largely of the leftist and Muslim groups at the core of the antiwar movement.

Turnout was down worldwide. But mostly, I’m just happy to see Big Media notice who’s at the “core” of the antiwar movement. Meanwhile, Blair’s rising in the polls:

After weeks of declining public approval, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s image has improved among Britons, according to a poll reported Saturday. The ICM Research poll found 56% believed Blair’s dogged support of the Bush administration’s confrontation with Iraq had been “about right,” while 26% thought he had been “too firm.”

A few weeks ago, only about a third of those Britons polled backed the government’s Iraq policy, including sending 45,000 troops to the Persian Gulf.

Blair’s personal approval rating also has climbed, by 11 percentage points to 40%. The shift reflects the apparent tendency to close ranks with the government once troops are in combat. Only 13% of those polled advocated an immediate end to the war, while 82% wanted the coalition to finish what it had started in Iraq.

Seems that ordinary people are less excitable than the media.

LOTS OF GOOD POSTS over at SgtStryker.com today. I’ve decided that I’m not going to try minute-by-minute newsblogging at the moment, because it’s being done so well there, and at The Command Post.

I’m following Josh Chafetz’s lead here. I’m always saying that the Blogosphere is smarter than I am — so let it do the work!

UPDATE: Oh, and don’t forget The Agonist, currently posting that:

CNN just announced that Greek antiwar advocates have tried to bomb an American bank and an American restaurant in Athens.

They’re not “antiwar,” CNN. They’re just on the other side.

GOOD NEWS/ BAD NEWS: Good news — Pakistan gets a female prime minister. Bad news — China taken over by fundamentalist Islam.

Alternative explanation: The Agence France Presse caption to this photo, “(AFP Photo) – Pakistan PM consults China on Iraq (Mon 24 Mar, 12:27 PM)” is pathetically wrong and no one has noticed.

(Via Tim Blair).

DRIVING INTO WORK I noticed some signs along Kingston Pike that seem to offer support for the war effort. This one, from an outfit that sells fresh seafood, is pretty straightforward: “Bombs bursting in air for freedom.” No doubt this sentiment would horrify the folks at the BBC.

The “support the troops” motif was somewhat more common. Here’s an example of a hardware store that’s selling at cost to military families, and encouraging others to do the same nationwide. Well, I hope that this gets the message out — it’s certainly a nice thing to do.

This sign doesn’t really relate to the war at all, except, I suppose, in the fevered “crusader” slogans of some Islamists and BBC talking heads. But although I found the message a bit muddled, theologically speaking, I thought it was funny enough to include here.

I’ll keep my eyes open for interesting signage. You do the same.

JIM BENNETT WRITES on the end of the transnational illusion.

IRAQIS HELPING A U.S. PILOT ESCAPE? “Too weird not to be true.” Well, maybe. Good story, though.

KEN LAYNE BLOGS THE SADDAM SPEECH:

Yeah, this Saddam speech is crap. If this had been taped today, or live, he would’ve mentioned the captured U.S. soldiers.

Jesus, they gave their names on Iraqi State TeeVee today. If you were Saddam and people doubted you were alive, wouldn’t you mention the U.S. soldiers caught today? . . .

Yeah, this is bullshit. He’s dead.

There’s much more, all of it funny.

MY LOCAL PAPER INTERVIEWS AN IRAQI-AMERICAN:

“You say no, you die. That simple,” Kadhim said. “They say, ‘OK, you free to go.’ They take you outside and shoot you. Or just shoot you right there.”

Kadhim said whenever a rebel against the regime entered the prison system they were very unlikely to ever emerge from it. Or if they did emerge, they were likely to become victims of a delayed but cruel surprise.

“If you get out of prison without a shot (from a needle), you lucky,” Kadhim said. “They give you a shot, and you go home. You die one month, two months later from the shot they give. Just like that. You die.”

Kadhim’s story is not unlike that of thousands of refugees who have fled Iraq to escape the ruthlessness of Saddam.

Funny, where are all those Europeans who criticize the United States for the death penalty? I guess they think that Iraqi lives are less valuable. At least, less valuable when they’re killed by Saddam. (See below). There’s also this:

Maybe now the Iraqi people will have a new idea,” he said. “They just want it to be over with Saddam. I think America will give my country freedom. If I were there, I would tell them that the Iraqi people are not their enemy. Some Arab countries are your enemy, but the Iraqi people aren’t. I can’t tell you which Arab countries. I would have big trouble.”

Kadhim’s friend, Qasim (who asked that his last name not be used because of the possibility of retribution against his relatives in Baghdad), said the truth about Saddam, is a thousand times worse than anyone can imagine.

And, sadly, this:

Qasim said he is glad American soldiers have returned to Iraq, he does not think they will be as welcome as they would have been in 1991 had they gone on to Baghdad.

“We had a revolution then,” he says. “Saddam would not have lasted two hours if the American troops had come.”

The old adage “If you strike at a king you must kill him” is being proven again. We should have gone all the way in 1991. Bush Sr. wimped out because of the fear of ugly pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers on TV.

Of course, Saddam’s behavior makes that sort of thing less likely this time around. But the last ten years, in which Saddam’s tyranny grew far worse despite alleged international supervision, make these worries of Nick Denton’s cogent:

Saddam as Ceausescu

The appearance of armed irregulars, still loyal to Saddam, parallels the resistance of Ceausescu’s secret police, the Securitate, even after most of the army had turned on the Romanian dictator. But, as this account of the 1989 revolution explains, it’s not as simple as regular army good, secret police bad. Lessons from the Romanian example: the deposition of a tyrant with multiple security forces is a mess, because there is no one military leader who can undercut the dictator; resistance can appear more organized than it is; they usually hide out in party headquarters and police buildings, rather than houses; watch out for snipers; and beware of over-reaction. Oh yes: you may have to kill the dictator on camera, and put a stake through his heart, before his loyalists finally give up, and ordinary citizens can finally feel free. One final guess: the worse the dictatorship, the less joyful the revolution. The inhabitants of Bucharest were so crushed by decades of harsh dictatorship, that they emerged suspicious of eachother, credulous of rumor, disorientated by the truth, seething with recrimination, and bitter, bitter, bitter. There will be nothing velvet about the Iraqi revolution.

I hope Nick’s wrong about this. But if he isn’t, it’s yet another reason to avoid half-measures in the future.

JOHN LEO WRITES ABOUT CIVILIAN CASUALTIES — and antiwar spin.

As near as I can tell, it’s a parody of Stalin: one person killed by America is a tragedy. A hundred thousand killed by Saddam, or a million by Pol Pot, are a statistic. But even the statistics are lies, as Leo points out, and the press tend to accept them uncritically:

A New York Times article (“Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead”) relied heavily on the findings of workers with Global Exchange, which the times identified as “an American organization that has sent survey teams into Afghan villages.” In fact, Global Exchange is a hard-left, antiwar, pro-Castro group whose numbers on war victims should never be taken at face value. Many groups on the left repeatedly insisted that civilian deaths were scandalously high. But that’s what they say during every war. Typical headlines included “Civilian Casualties Mount in Afghanistan” (the World Socialist Web Site) and “U.S. Raids Draw Fire for Civilian Casualties” (Common Dreams News Center).

The most publicized analysis came from Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire, who claims that between 3,700 and 4,000 Afghan civilians died in the war. Herold, an antiwar leftist, says the U.S. military is mostly white and willing to drop bombs on populous areas, thus “sacrificing the darker-skinned Afghans.” Admirers credited Herold with meticulous and original analysis of many sources during 12- to 14-hour days on the Internet. Some people loved Herold’s numbers because they were said to show that the United States killed more innocent people in Afghanistan than Osama bin Laden killed in New York. But several analysts accused Herold of questionable and ideological treatment of the numbers: double counting, confusing combatants with noncombatants, and, in the words of one commentator, “blind acceptance of deliberately inflated Taliban accounts.”

Other less publicized estimates of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are far lower than Herold’s.

And why, I wonder, are they “less publicized?”

UPDATE: Here’s more on Marc Herold’s, ahem, flawed methodology.

I’LL BE POSTING LATER — in the meantime, go read Andrew Sullivan on Saddam’s strategy — and on the allies he’s counting on in the West. This column by Ralph Peters is worth reading too.