BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT WRITES:

Reporters have been struck by how few busted Iraqi tanks have contained any dead Iraqis, and I have already joined the small chorus asking about where the dead Iraqi bodies are to be seen in our newspapers and on our screens, because despite everything there have to have been some.

But things like these concrete bombs suggest another explanation for the general absence of dead Iraqi soldiers. It wasn’t just that the Iraqis were uniquely unwilling to fight for the uniquely nasty Saddamite regime. There was also the fact that, for the first time in the history of conventional warfare, “melting away” actually worked as a way to stay alive. Faced with an enemy willing and unprecedentedly able to smash all your big weapons, but willing to leave you alone if you just got the hell out of there, which the Iraqis were facing if I understand Coalition tactics correctly, they actually could run away.

If this is correct, then this is just one more reason among hundreds to admire all the thought that has gone into the Coalition attack and its tactics, throughout the last few weeks but also throughout the previous year and more. I hope that, when the story emerges, we will discover that the Coalition wasn’t just trying to avoid killing Iraqi civilians, but that they were also trying to avoid killing Iraqi soldiers more than was absolutely necessary to protect their own activities. Certainly the public pronouncements of Rumsfeld and co. suggest this. “Go home, abandon your weapons”, etc. Well, that’s what seems to have happened.

Interesting, and I hope the same thing. Of course, an absence of dead Iraqis would disappoint the bloody-shirt element of the peace movement, if not the Pentagon. But Marc Herold can probably supply dead bodies as needed, in any quantity requested. . . .