perfidy

"In so far as the enemy has a strategy, it's to use their own people as hostages. The "pockets of resistance" in the southern towns have been able to make mischief because they blend in with the local populations. They know that Washington and its allies are concerned above all to avoid casualties among Iraqi civilians and, indeed, among your typical Iraqi conscripts. In other words, everything the Baath regime does is predicated on the moral superiority of their foe."

(Emphasis mine) and: 

"When I say the allies are concerned above all to avoid not just civilian but pretty much any enemy casualties, I mean it. Washington has taken a decision to expose its forces to greater danger in order to all but eliminate collateral damage. Hence, the policy of simply bypassing towns rather than seizing them to secure flanks and rears; and of giving every Iraqi the benefit of the doubt, including the fake surrenderers who ambushed the US marines at Nasiriyah. If you can get to a rooftop, you can fire rocket-propelled grenades at the Brits and Yanks with impunity; under the most onerous rules of engagement you could devise, they won't fire back just in case the building you're standing on hasn't been completely evacuated. This is the operational opposite, one should note, of Bill Clinton's Kosovo campaign. A lot of analysts over here are disturbed by this excessive deference to non-military considerations, especially with rumours that the Baathists in their death throes are planning to go chemical. But it's working out swell for the Iraqis. On the first night of "Shock and Awe" in Baghdad, the TV boys' preferred line was, "it looks like Dresden." The next day, the Iraqi foreign minister announced a civilian death toll of ...four. Four? You mean, four thousand? But no. Single figures. Not exactly Dresdenesque, and a long way from the anti-war movement's thoughtful projections. "Thousands will die as - collateral damage,"’ declared Yahya Ibrahim in the New Straits Times. "Tens of thousands will die and the Middle East be plunged into chaos and bloodshed," warned George Galloway. "Why do hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have to die when they're no threat to us?" asked Margo MacDonald in the Edinburgh Evening News. "The United States is about to destroy an entire country and kill 20 per cent of its people," wrote Nicholas Oshukany in Monday's Kitchener Waterloo Record in Canada. That would be just shy of five million dead Iraqis. What a mound of corpses! But the Yanks will have to pick up the pace a bit. Right now, there are so many civilian casualties that, as my compatriot Andrew Coyne puts it, Robert Fisk can personally visit them all.’

I think a lot of people need to take some stress tabs, so that we can talk about things reasonably.