The campaign against Saddam started with a direct attack on him. A broadcast of somebody claiming to be Saddam (who knows, maybe he even was Saddam, although he looked more like his half-brother) got on Iraqi TV to reassure his people that he had survived. Time will tell.
I hope the campaign is over quickly – the sooner it is over, the fewer casualties all around (Iraqi soldiers and civilians, American soldiers and possibly civilians). My daughter mentioned I didn’t look happy this morning. While I fully support the campaign, I’m not happy about war. Oh, I’ll be elated when it’s over, and happy for all of us, but not now.
The news media is in overdrive. I happened to hit a couple of big media web sites, and headed to their descriptions of weapons. Given all the time leading up to the war, you’d think they’d do a better job. CNN’s descriptions were extremely brief. CBS had a great picture but unidentified picture of SLAM ER and no description; while their descriptions were lengthy they seemed to be cut and paste jobs of numerous press releases giving rise to problems of verb tense and out of date information. ABC did a better job and even managed to describe SLAM ER.
The guys on Fox’s morning show assured us that the people operating that camera providing a view of Baghdad were perfectly safe – I think he has more faith in the precision of our armament than even our armed forces do.
There are lots of rumors swirling around; my favorite was yesterday’s claim that Tariq Azziz had either been killed or defected. It soon went the way of the report on 911 that a bomb had blown up at the State Department. That’s what I love about the media – always insisting they are accurate and don’t put anything on until it’s verified, yet unable to ever separate the wheat from the chaff on a breaking story, and rarely bothering to correct their old mistakes more than once. If you make the mistake of not watching/listening, the only way to tell what was accurate and what wasn’t is that they eventually stop repeating the inaccurate. Unfortunately, there is a lag while you try to figure out if the information is no longer operable, or they just haven’t gotten around to repeating it yet.
