The US, UN & Iraq II

Appears the US is targeting journalists now, Al Jazeera was hit in two other incidents.

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When told of the attack[US bombs may have killed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein], the Marines I'm traveling with ?- the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Brigade of the 1st Marine Division ?- were less than impressed: they've heard too many previous reports that later turned out to be untrue. Sure, they killed him, one Marine told me. "And they got Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar too."
Added another: "And they'll probably say they found [former Teamster leader] Jimmy Hoffa's body in there as well."
On their trip north from Kuwait to the city limits of Baghdad, the Marines have learned to trust only those things they can see in front of them. They started out thinking they would be rounding up prisoners of war, since the predictions were that the Iraqi regular army in southern Iraq would surrender en masse.
Instead, they found themselves in rolling firefights, against irregular troops dressed as civilians and armed only with machine guns or rocket-propelled grenades who attacked their columns with pickups or even motorcycles.
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http://msnbc.com/news/897275.asp?cp1=1

War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind. Modern industrial warfare means that most of those who are killed never see their attackers. There is nothing glorious or gallant about it. If we saw what wounds did to bodies, how killing is far more like butchering an animal than the clean and neat Hollywood deaths on the screen, it would turn our stomachs. If we saw how war turns young people into intoxicated killers, how it gives soldiers a license to destroy not only things but other human beings, and if we saw the perverse thrill such destruction brings, we would be horrified and frightened. If we understood that combat is often a constant battle with a consuming fear we have perhaps never known, a battle that we often lose, we would find the abstract words of war--glory, honor and patriotism--not only hollow but obscene. If we saw the deep psychological scars of slaughter, the way it maims and stunts those who participate in war for the rest of their lives, we would keep our children away. Indeed, it would be hard to wage war...... The embedding of several hundred journalists in military units does not diminish the lie. These journalists do not have access to their own transportation. They depend on the military for everything, from food to a place to sleep. They look to the soldiers around them for protection. When they feel the fear of hostile fire, they identify and seek to protect those who protect them. They become part of the team. It is a natural reaction. I have felt it...... I doubt the journalists filing the hollow reports from Iraq, in which there are images but rarely any content, are aware of how they are being manipulated. They, like everyone else, believe. But when they look back they will find that war is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and of idealists by the cynical men who wield power, the ones who rarely pay the cost of war. We pay that cost. And we will pay it again.