reason to assume that such stories will be multiplied a hundred, if not a thousand times over as U.S. forces approach the capital of the Republic of Fear."

The real story of "liberated" Safwan is told by Geoffrey York of the [Canada] Globe and Mail:

"The Iraqi teenager pointed to the stains on the chest of his robe. ‘See,’ he said. ‘They shot my brother, and this is his blood.’

"Few people in Safwan are willing to forgive and forget. As many as a dozen people were killed here at the start of the war, when U.S. and British forces bombarded the town and headed northward toward Basra. The deaths have provided an easy propaganda victory for the Saddam Hussein loyalists, who still hold considerable influence here.

‘The British troops are shootingour soldiers in the field, this desire for freedom is much broader than Perle and his co-thinkers ever imagined: it apparently includes the desire to be free of foreign invaders. Oh well, back to the drawing board .

Perle’s disgrace underscores the lesson of the first week of this war. The Powell Doctrine of intervening only when all other avenues have been exhausted, and then only in overwhelming force, is right  at least, in a military sense – and the Democratist ideologues who have taken over the top civilian posts in the Defense Department are dead wrong. Remember way back in summer of 2002 when the first plans for the invasion were being floated? While senior military officers wanted to replay Gulf War I and go in with