War is not nice. People are going to die, combatants and non-combatants, don't be suprised by tactics.

We entered into this war with some bad assumptions and too much enthusiam. We projected massive surrenders and capitualations that haven't taken place so far. Instead we have been subjected to guerrilla type tactics and we appear confused by them. This will be soon corrected, but we will see more death than we had hoped for.

The Bush administration made the same assumption that Hitler made when he decided to invade Russia. He said, "We have only to kick in the door and it will fall down." The Wehrmacht was much surprised and mistakken.

At Stalingrad Marshall Zhukov gathered together all his field soldier and told them they were cowards and surrender was not an option.

Zhukov lined up his soldiers and had them count out up to ten. And he had every tenth man shot on the spot. The Roman legions did this also. It certainly takes away the incentive to surrender knowing your own troops will not hesitate to kill you if you capitulate.

Right now it looks like our Blitzkrieg, er, "Shock and awe" is not making the world a safer place as anticipated. Perhaps we will do better in the coming weeks. We will not be able to fight a humanitarian war that protects civilians. We are going to have to fight this to win and protect our own troops.

This will make a great many civilian kills and our media had better stop making this out to be a football game and seeing their role as being the scorekeeper.

This is war. There is no morality in the waging of it. There is only the need to win.

Publius