scriminate as missiles land in markets and residential neighborhoods.

The Iraq war has suddenly taken on the worst features of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Facing a defiant and resisting population, U.S. troops, under the direction of their officers, treat all members of the population as suspect and decide to shoot first and ask questions later. The U.S. soldiers have been lied to about their mission. They have been sent to kill and be killed in a war for empire and conquest, not liberation. U.S. casualties are mounting in this war that need not have happened.

On March 31, there was a massacre of civilians, mainly women and their children, whose crime was that they were driving on a roadway in their own country. As their van approached a checkpoint, U.S. soldiers destroyed their vehicle with a barrage of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of their M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The Washington Post quoted Capt. Ronny Johnson of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in his series of orders to the troops present:

- "Fire a warning shot"

- "Stop [messing] around!"

- "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"

- "Cease fire!"

- "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning

shot soon enough!"

The "shoot first ask questions later" strategy is not the result of spontaneous actions by scared and edgy troops. These are orders given the troops from the Pentagon high command.

"Everyone is now seen as a combatant until proven otherwise," a Pentagon official is quoted in the Washington Post of April 1, 2003. The Pentagon recognizes that the shift in tactics will be understood as a brutal escalation of force against the civilian population and that their earlier posture as "liberators" will be exposed. "You'll see acts of kindness, medical care and the like, but the large scale aid effort will have to wait," a Pentagon official told the Washington Post. In fact the new U.S. strategy now is deliberately preventing Iraqi civilians in Nassiriya and other towns from receiving food and water unless they cooperate with the occupation forces.

U.S. Marine Operations Commander Lt. Colonel Paul Roche told reporters on March 31 that the U.S. strategy towards the people of the city of Nassiriya included the use of food and water as a weapon to terrorize and break the will of the civilian population.

In the April 1 front page of the Washington Post, the Pentagon's new strategy is euphemistically referred to in the headline "U.S. troops instructed to use tougher tactics."

The assault against civilians is being reported in greater detail and honesty by the world media outside the United States. This change in U.S. tactics is, as the following report shows, encouraging the most racist and homicidal tendencies among U.S. soldiers at the front.

It is important to read the following passage from the UK Times of Sunday, March 30. It reports of a gruesome scene outside of Nassiriya. Some fifteen vehicles, including a minivan and a couple of trucks, were found destroyed and riddled with bullets by the Times UK reporter Mark Franchetti:

"Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy artillery.

"Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to the coalition's supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young American marines with orders to shoot anything that moved.

"One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.

"Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her father. Half his head was missing.

"Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman - perhaps the girl's mother - was dead, slumped in the back seat. A US Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies. "This was not the only family who had taken what they thought was a last chance for safety. A father, baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave. On the bridge itself a dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a donkey."

The UK Times article also documents that in Iraq, just as in Vietnam, the U.S. soldiers are being trained to wage war against a civilian population by dehumanizing those whom they are killing.

"I'll Just Kill Him"

"As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third child, Isabella, was born while he was on board ship en route to the Gulf, appeared beside me.

" 'Did you see all that?' he asked, his eyes filled with tears. 'Did you see that little baby girl? I carried her body and buried it as best I could but I had no time. It really gets to me to see children being killed like this, but we had no choice.'

"Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they surveyed the scene. 'The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy,' said Corporal Ryan Dupre. 'I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him.' "

Crimes Against Humanity

George Bush and the high command are guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes. What we are witnessing is a full-scale massacre carried out from the land, the air and the sea assault. The U.S. media presents the war as carefully packaged propaganda and trivializes the actual human costs of the war by turning it into something of a spectator sport. But the Iraqi people cannot escape this war and they cannot turn off their television to make it go away.

Again, it is the non-U.S. press that reveals the extent of the criminality of the war.

The full article can be found at http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=AIXRWPJ3C5TXOCRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=2471290

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