WHAT WAS IT ALL FOR?: Now that The Saturday Show has moved back to BBC1, the reappearance of Saturday Kitchen Live on BBC2 suggests we've reached a point where we're at least pretending we're not at war anymore. And, of course, the people who wanted to go to war all along are gloating (the New York Post's choice of word; they seem to think that gloating is a positive thing to do), seeming to think that the anti-war majority had been suggesting that America's massive army wouldn't have been able to destroy Iraq-as-she-was - as a letter writer to the Guardian pointed out yesterday, "we didn't say you couldn't, we said you shouldn't" - although, of course, as yet, they haven't.
What's a bit sickening about the premature acclamation is the glib way that the Iraqi civilian deaths - conservative estimates are around 1,500 - are dismissed as being "on the low side", which in itself is pretty shabby; sure it's only half the number of innocent people slaughtered on September 11th 2001, but they're still people; that's without factoring in the people seriously injured; or the people so successfully shocked and awed they might find it difficult to get their lives back. And the 2,300 Iraqi troops believed to have been killed - sure, some - maybe many - of them were probably dying for something they believed in, but how many times were we told that the Iraqi regular army were being forced to fight because they had Republican Guards stood behind them threatening to kill them and their families if they didn't? Surely cannon fodder marched onto the US guns are just as innocent as the families killed for nothing more than living a bit too close to a government building, or happening to get in the way of a Not That Smart bomb.
So, was it worth it? There never were any really clearly defined war aims, which makes it easier for America to say "Yup, that was what we came here for", but let's see how the vague plan has worked.
First up, there was the Iraqi people, freeing from tyranny and so on. Now, of course, the removal of Saddam is a Good Thing, and nobody has ever denied that Baghdad without him would be potentially a much better place. But the power vacuum that has created a swirling vortex of looting and fear - however much Downing Street and the Pentagon might want to pretend journalists are blowing it up out of proportion. Rumsfeld reckons "it's the same shot of the same guy carrying a vase out of the same shop again and again" - he's probably too busy to keep up, bless him, so we'll help him out: CNN.com has got a collection of pictures and audio commentary on the looting across the country - not a vase in sight. deutsche-welle has got a chap wheeling away office equipment, followed by a kid with a chair. No vases. Even while London and Washington insist there is no looting, they also say that the looting would be a side effect of freedom, if it was happening, and it isn't anyway, and if it is, then there's only a little, and it's being blown up by the media. You might wonder that the press is keen to blow it up when you get The Times being robbed at gunpoint by guerillas. You have to be impressed with the Americans bid to win hearts and minds, when less than forty-eight hours after the "jubiliation", they've managed to turn Baghdad residents dewy-eyed for the good old days of Saddam, when at least you could leave your doors open: "It's my country, and I hate Saddam," he said. "But why are they allowing robbing, why are they allowing people to set fire to buildings? Saddam was right to put those kinds of people in prison. I don't like Saddam, I hate him; but when I see American soldiers I want to spit on them." [source: The Guardian].
But at least the people who survive the looting, cluster bombs and vigilantees taking advantage of the darkness at the end of the regime to settle scores will be free of Saddam and his evil henchmen, right? That golden promise of a new start for the country - the people who kept the Ba'ath Party apparatus ticking over for the last twenty years long gone? Except, of course, for the
members of Saddam's police who are going to be given a quick respray and let back out to - ahem - keep law and order on behalf of the Americans. Oh, and Sheikh Muzahim Mustafa Kanan Tamimi, who used to be one of Saddam's brigadier-generals and a major figure in the Ba'ath party. But UK armed forces minister Adam Ingram says we have to deal with "compromised and tainted Iraqis" - which must give Saddam hope that if he can just avoid being killed in the next couple of weeks, he too might be able to make the best of a fraught situation and at least get himself a job in charge of something or other.
But maybe we're being too harsh. Let's move our focus from the Iraqi people - now at least less likely to be killed by falling bombs. Except, of course,even as the statue was falling, the US was moving its MOAB fuck-off-huge bomb into place to see what it could do ("smoke out saddam"). Testing the MOAB - the biggest thing without a nuclear bit in the death-from-the-sky market - was probably one of the war aims uncle Don forgot to mention; you might remember that during the ever-popular Second World War the US test-drove the new Atomic Bomb on a Japan that they already knew was about to surrender (indeed, they had to rush to get 'em both in while they were still fighting.)
But we're forgetting - the dangers Saddam posed to his neighbours was the real reason we were at war, wasn't it? The countries bordering Iraq will now be breathing a whole lot more easily - except for Syria and Iran, of course. But at least Turkey - afraid of the emergence of a Kurdish free state threatening its own stability - have said they don't feel the need to invade Northern Iraq as a pre-emptive move. For Now. The right, clearly, is reserved, and the Americans have firmly established the principle that in the twenty-first century, you should go to war not because of what has happened, but because of what might.
Which leads us to those weapons of mass destruction which would threaten us all. They've found lots and lots of these. Except they keep turning out, frustratingly, to be pesticides (not to be sneered at - the Americans showed what defoliants can do back in 'Nam, remember), and even if they do find some chemical weapons, or even nukes, they will have to explain why they went to war to stop the possibility of Saddam using them, only for him not to use them even when he had nothing to lose by doing so. But there will be a reason, I'm sure.
Maybe it was that he could have given them to terrorists. To use. After all, the US troops have found nuclear material. The smokeyness of the gun was cleared a little when the UN inspectors said "Yes... we did actually know about this, and we'd sealed the building so we knew it was safe. Did you break the seal?" Prompting the US Army to mutter that it wasn't sure... there might have been a seal, or there might not. Maybe?. So, the brilliant outcome is that by not bothering to check if they were entering a known facility, the world is now unable to tell if the building had been entered before Bush chased out the arms inspectors and his army kicking the door in.
Making us all safer from terrorism and the danger of a dirty bomb by ensuring Iraq's nuclear material didn't fall into the wrong hands - that was another war aim, wasn't it?
So, all in all, then, a few billion pounds well spent - a population freed from the day to day drudgery of living under a repressive regime to discover the joys of living under the same people, but now with added social collapse, apart from the ones not living; a Middle East which is either waiting for invasion, or else planning one - should the need arise; and nuclear material which used to be safely locked away now possibly circulating on the black market. Doubtless all part of Donald Rumsfeld's cunning plan. Triples all round, guys.

 
PERCY SUGDEN WILL SAVE US ALL: The US military briefing has just announced that the problems of hell breaking loose in the power vacuum the coalition have opened up in Iraq will be solved by the establishment of... a neighbourhood watch scheme. Classy. Maybe they could also stamp bicycles with postcodes as well?
What does amuse us is a few hundred people pull down a statue in Baghdad, and Donald Rumsfeld welcomes the pictures as being a wonderful sight demonstrating the true jubilation of the Iraqi people.
At least a few thousand people riot and Rumsfeld condemns the use the scenes on TV as it's - what was it? Chicken Little false impressions generated by focusing on the actions of a few and pretending that it's typical of the nation as a whole. Hmmm.

 
STATUE-BY-STATUE: BBC email alerts watching the end...
09-04-03 14.57 BST US armoured personnel carrier pulls down a giant statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad, to the cheers of jubilant Iraqis
10-04-03 08.46 Kurdish fighters reported to be in centre of Kirkuk, local people rejoice.
14.57 A Baghdad hospital is ransacked and other hospitals in the Iraqi capital are closed because of the street violence and looting, a Red Cross spokeswoman says.
16.27 Four US Marines are seriously injured in an apparent suicide bombing attack in Baghdad - reports

 
LIVE...: "Let's go live now to Sandhurst, where the Prime Minister is speaking" says News 24, cutting - unfortunately - to a crowd shot of a young man yawning a huge yawn.
Incidently, why is the Prime Minister doing the Passing Out ceremony? Normally its the Queen - who, constitutionally, is the head of the Army. It's almost a quiet coup, really.

 
NO PROFIT IN PEACE: You have to admire the sick slickness that led Sony to sign up the intellectual rights on the phrase 'shock and awe' the day after the war started. We wonder if we can expect further playstation games called 'Shell the journalist' and 'Look, it's sad about the kid whose family were all killed and him losing his arms and all, but hey, we've got to make a profit.' We don't think spitting at Sony executives would be out of order, to be honest. They'll probably find a way to make money out of that, too.

 
WHAT IF THEY TOPPLED A REGIME AND NOBODY CAME?: Indymedia has got an interesting longshot of the statue toppling from yesterday which makes it look a little less like "crowds of jubilant Iraqis", more like "a few Iraqis" and then suggests that the "ordinary" Iraqis that were there might well have been soldiers anyway. Soldiers? In civilian clothes? Wasn't that one of the devious tricks the US were complaining about Iraq pulling?

 
THE TABS: Curious that Page Three of The Sun chose to mark "liberation" by covering up the - ahem - babe's nipples (maybe this out of respect for the muslim religion?). What's even funnier is the way that all the tabloids seem to have equated the pulling down of a statue with the winning of the war (most notably The Daily Star whose headline is, erm, We Won The War, happily ignoring the bits of Baghdad not yet under coalition control). It's like they're treating it like it was a paintball game - "your mission is to capture the blue team's statue and pull it to the ground..."

 
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME: Anti-Saddam Iraqis in Detroit attack Al-Jazeera team, accusing them of "supporting the regime until the last minute." So, there's a hint of the media freedom and the pluralistic debate we can expect in New Iraq, then.

 
JOURANLISTIC TICS: Yahoo News reported confidently that the Iraqi ambassador to London had become the first official to "concede defeat", neatly ignoring his complete inability to do any such thing; meanwhile, a BBC reporter explained the shortage of people on the streets of Baghdad yesterday evening by saying they'd be scared of "looting and lawlessness" - thereby suggesting the fear is of fellow Iraqis, and not the people who until the previous night were bombing the fuck out of them who turned up with massive tanks and loads of guns. Of course.

 
HE GETS AWAY AGAIN...: Is it just us, or is it kind of amazing that whenever the US get hold of great intelligence about the whereabouts of Saddam, and go and destroy the building, they then discover he may have left a few minutes before...
I'm thinking of ringing up and telling the Americans Saddam is hiding in that ugly building Reed use on Lime Street here in Liverpool - it would make sense, he might be seeking new work this morning. They'll come and level that for us, too, I'd bet.

 
LET'S HOPE IT'S ALMOST OVER: Or at least the bombing - the starving, the homelessness, the night terrors, the missing limbs, the lost loved ones; these things will continue, of course. But at least the bombing might be over. And let's hope that this is will be an end of it. Although the way the Americans have cut through in the last couple of days scares the hell out of us here at Warticker, for as surely as the swagger in the light of the Afghan "victory" made the Iraq war inevitable, we can only see the dragging down of that Saddam statue as the the first step towards - where? Syria, Iran, North Korea?
"Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time, says Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a close friend who talks with Bush every day. His history degree from Yale makes him mindful of the importance of the moment. He knows he's making "history-changing decisions," Evans says. But Bush doesn't keep a diary or other personal record of the events that will form his legacy. Aides take notes, but there's no stenographer in most meetings, nor are they videotaped or recorded." [Source: USA Today 2nd April 2003] So, he's learned from history. Most closely, it seems, from the history of Dick Nixon. Leave no trace.

 
SHOW YOUR VOICE THROUGH GOOGLE: As we understand it, warbitch is encouraging people to show their true alleigances by searching on Google for Pro-war or Anti-war; presumably with the winner in the figures when the next Google Zeitgeist number crunch comes out being declared the people's will. Or if it's not, then it should be.

 
THAT COULD BE DEEMED QUITE HANDY: Al-Jazeera beaten about a bit; Arab journalists trapped in the Hotel unable to get out... and now aeronautics.ru - which provided an alternative perspective - has had to stop its distilling of various military sources. And just as the sceptical media dries up, we're told the people of Baghdad have come out jubilating on the streets. Hmmm.

 
HERE'S A QUESTION: Was the slaughter of the journalists an accident, and thus more evidence that the Americans can't actually "carefully target" their bombing - and as such have been misleading the world since before the war; or, if the targetting is really accurate, does this mean that journalists who haven't signed up to see the story the US' eyes are now viewed as legitimate targets?

 
STREET BY STREET: Further BBC email alerts, for those of you who are keeping track:
06-04-03 08.47 BST A US plane drops a bomb on a group of US special forces, killing some of them and an unknown number of civilians, says the BBC's John Simpson who is travelling with the convoy.
09.03 British tanks are reported to have entered the centre of Iraq's second city, Basra.
10.42 A convoy of Russian embassy diplomats is reported to have come under fire as they were evacuating from Baghdad and many are thought to have been injured.
14.17 US forces have begun to airlift Iraqi opposition fighters into southern Iraq, reports say
07-04-03 04.37 A column of US tanks and armoured vehicles are attacking targets in central Baghdad, American military officials say.
05.37 American forces have control of the centre of Baghdad and the heart of the Iraqi Government structure, says a US Army colonel.
08-04-03 02.17 US military bomb residential district in Baghdad where they believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein may be.

 
A RETURN TO THE GREATEST HITS: Destroying the offices of a non-embedded TV company in one conflict might be an accident...
twice starts to look like policy.

 
ON LIVING IN A LAND OF FREE SPEECH: When people say they're anti war, pro-war responses usually include, sooner or later, "ah, but you should bear in mind if you said you were against Iraqi government policy, you'd be taken away in the night and tortured or killed." Unlike America, of course, where you merely have people open fire on you.

 
WHAT IRAQ HAS TO LOOK FORWARD TO: Newsday carries this report from Afghanistan on the - ahem - success of American nation building there. Soldiers and police haven't been paid and are giving up; reconstruction work amounts to little more than a few spots of effort here and there; Taliban regrouping; random killings...