6:30:12 PM    

Top US hawk Perle resigns. Veteran US Government hawk Richard Perle resigns as chairman of a top Pentagon advisory group amid conflict of interest claims. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Mr Perle had also not only argued for the need to go to war with Iraq, he had strongly suggested that the Iraqis would put up minimal resistance.

6:20:35 PM    

The Bush administration sounds the alarm for war and blows the trumpet for tax cuts, and Congress plunges ahead with the cuts in domestic programs that must inevitably follow. The voices of those who object are effectively silenced by the war propaganda and the fear of seeming unpatriotic.

With attention thus deflected, the administration and its allies in Congress have come up with one proposal after another to weaken programs that were designed to help struggling Americans.

5:55:43 PM    

Cheney even went on to throw out the possibility that Baghdad would fall without any fighting. "I can't say with certainty that there will be no battle for Baghdad," he said. "We have to be prepared for that possibility."

Asked about Cheney's rather optimistic remarks on Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said that "the vice president said what he said because he had reason -- good reason -- to say it."

...

In order to sell a war -- or "product," as White House chief of staff Andy Card once deemed the Iraq campaign -- any administration has to imply that the objective will be carried out swiftly, and with relatively little pain.

...

When the president made his supplemental budget request to fund the war based on what some still might call optimistic numbers -- fighting for 30 days or so, and an occupation of six months -- a senior administration official who was trotted out Monday night in order to brief reporters on the budget request explained that the figures were based on the fact that Rumsfeld "has right along said that he thought that fighting was likely to last weeks, not months." Within six months, the U.S. would see "the beginning of withdrawal of troops."

5:38:48 PM    

The Bush administration's decision not to attack Iraq's television broadcast capabilities at the outset of this war is a telling one. It seems to reflect the calculation that Mr.. Hussein's regime was so brittle it would quickly fall. Bush planners appear to have left television off the initial target list because they wanted to use it to administer Iraq immediately after the war and to limit the damage to civilian infrastructure.

Reports from Iraq, however, suggest that the American restraint was seen by many Iraqis as an indication of Mr. Hussein's resilience, undermining the allied message that his days were numbered.

5:25:21 PM    

The attacks call into question the American strategy of sweeping past Iraqi Army positions and towns to try to reach Baghdad swiftly and, as officers here put it, "cut off the head" of the regime. The attacks also call into question the Americans' confident belief that they would be welcomed as liberators.

Instead, the Americans could find their long and vulnerable supply lines [~]convoys of thousands and thousands of trucks hauling food, fuel, water and ammunition stretching back into Kuwait [~] subject to attack and interdiction.

...

But while the Marines say they have easily cut down most of the attackers with overwhelming firepower, they have been impressed in many cases with their tenacity. In one widely recounted incident, a force of about 20 guerrillas charged a Marine armored patrol head on. Only about eight Iraqis survived the first devastating round of fire [~] but they got up and charged again.

"They're pretty gutsy, they're showing a lot of guts," said Capt. Dave Nettles, an intelligence officer with the Seventh Regimental Combat Team, whose light-armored reconnaissance patrols have had several scraps with the guerrillas. "Maybe they don't have anything to lose."

5:18:34 PM    

Anti-War Protesters Take Digital Turn. As bombs blasted Baghdad last week, dozens of cell phones in China buzzed with messages about where to stage an anti-war protest. In Cairo, activists tapped out text messages to summon 5,000 demonstrators to a central square. And in San Francisco, technophiles beamed live footage from protests to anti-war Web sites. [Associated Press war headlines via GoUpstate.com]
5:13:17 PM