The Hounds of War: a Dedication to Our Leaders

 

 

 

 

 

The Hounds of War: a Dedication to Our Leaders     An Age of Fools offers a record of the first decade of the 21st century as the newly appointed administration of George W. Bush entered the White House and inaugurated a decade of deceit and destruction that catapulted the United States into a totalitarian dictatorship that ravaged the world at will. by William A Cook Each morning we wake to the rabid wail of old defeated warriors, now no longer in halls of power, who prowl the studios of our infotainment industry and the commercial temples of our ministers of war to yelp and whine one last time before they succumb to the inevitable: a feast for maggots. How sad to witness that ancient soldier, Senator John McCain, shuffle before the cameras, one last glorious moment before the klieg lights finally go out, saliva dripping from his lips in curdled drops—“more war!, more war!, more war!” How ironic to hear our former snarling Vice President, Dick Cheney, risen from the dead with a new heart, yet oblivious to the suffering and destruction he brought to the world, growl again for “more war! more war! more war!” How ignominious for Paul Wolfowitz to crawl from his cave to tell the American people to finish what he had brought to Iraq, a blessed democracy welcomed with flowers from the people there, his glorious little war that would be paid for by Iraqi oil profits. How repugnant to watch Bill Kristol grovel before those he urged into war, not the dead soldiers or the dead Iraqis who suffered his disastrous thoughts turned into reality, but those he deceived into believing this was a war America should have fought only to realize it was built on deception and lies, all hidden as necessary for America’s security when in fact it was a war of proxy for his true country, Israel. How demented these hounds of war, defending the indefensible, blaming those who defied them, the brilliant intellects that strike hard the word processing keys as they sit in air conditioned offices surrounded by award plaques given to their brilliance by AIPAC and PNAC, and all the other think tank clones that keep wars going ensuring an incestuous birthing of rapid, deceitful, boastful articles to manage public opinion to their will. For eight years I lived their lies as they, unelected, self-proclaimed experts on America and her future, crafted the foreign policy of this nation, turning it into a lawless state devoted to preemptive strikes, extrajudicial executions, torture and mass death for the people of the mid-east. During those eight years I wrote hundreds of articles attempting to clarify their deception. I have been gathering that material into a new book devoted to this destructive crew that hijacked the United States, and would you believe they have arisen from the slough of lies into which they were pushed by a world sick of their arrogance and hubris attempting yet again to befuddle thinking people into believing that they were right. Their very existence it appears depends on unending war; it is their identity without which they do not exist. With that said, let me introduce you to An Age of Fools, the title of my new work, as it seems their hubris has forced it to be exposed before it is published. I’ll give a few passages from the Prologue followed by a soliloquy that seeks an answer to why, why “Men of War”? An Age of Fools offers a record of the first decade of the 21st century as the newly appointed administration of George W. Bush entered the White House and inaugurated a decade of deceit and destruction that catapulted the United States into a totalitarian dictatorship that ravaged the world at will. It is not an historical study, nor is it a journalistic record, nor a study devoted to military strategies for world dominance. It is rather a literary record captured in poems, poetry, plays and polemics drawing upon the tools of the artist, reflecting therefore the attitude, the mindset and the devotion of those who record and archive the behavior of humans as they live out the values and virtues, aspirations and dreams, and desires of all who lived through these years as the perpetrators or the victims of those who ruled. Over 500 years ago as Columbus bumbled his way to the “new” world, Sebastian Brant published broadsides describing recent events, often in satiric lampoons barbed with his personal philosophy, often with political significance, to enlighten the masses, wisdom crafted in verse dressed in caustic commentary. In 1494, just two years after Columbus’ fateful voyage, destined to inaugurate the greatest holocaust in human history, Brant’s masterpiece, the Narrenschiff, appeared, a collection of 112 verses in iambic tetrameter, each dressed out in rhyming couplets accompanied by magnificently carved woodcuts, companion pieces of polemical art that captured his times caustically and truthfully as the Holy Roman Empire entered the 16th century, a time of genocide abroad, of inquisition at home and of religious reform throughout Europe. Brant’s Ship of Fools conveys his lifelong desire to bring peace and harmony to his country by lambasting the fools– their failures and their infirmities—that ruled and gave acceptance to an earlier age of fools. It is Brant’s enveloping narrative that entices my interest in his work. While 500 years separates his efforts from mine, and the bridging of centuries offers parallels between the 15th and the 21stcenturies, it is the embodiment of civilized progress in the hands of fools that captures his truth and awakens mine. That fools exist in the 15th century surprises no one; that they offer comparison with those in the 21st century offers delight for the cynic; but it’s the idiocy of today’s fools and their heinous impact on our lives, so much greater than that possible just 500 years ago, that must force us to contemplation of the word progress and the word civilized. Brant’s narrative journey remained in the Roman Empire with Maximilian’s mantle covering a land mass from the ports of Spain to the castles of Germany; today that narrative encompasses the entire globe ushered in by fools untethered to a government by election or appointment and hence but rogue officials officiating for the people as they led their nation to a feast of offal, the putrid detritus of millions charred by depleted uranium, white phosphorus, flechette bombs, “mother bombs” carrying their children, drones, assassinations and lawlessness beyond contemplation. Such are the fools that have taken hold in our world. Today’s fools must be defined as they are not human, not sympathetic to their brethren, not resident in a shared universe, not conversant with the equality that resides in each and every human walking the earth, not sensitive to pain or suffering awaiting those who are the recipients of their calculated and devastating slaughter, not conscious of a necessity to share the fruits of this earth with all, to seek solutions to the waste and destruction imbedded in their control of forces that devastate the planet; no, today’s fools must be seen as devoid of human spirit, as creatures that find worth within the mortal flesh that envelopes their bones like a sheet of tissue draped as a shroud over their wasted minds bereft of emotions or hearts or souls, unable to think beyond self and the void that is their wasted life. Today’s fools would turn everything in the world into products for consumption, including any who obstruct their desires; Jehovah, God of War (see Exodus), and Saklas, the fool, the god of mindlessness, are false gods yet are their gods, ruthless and reckless our fools thrive on the misery and suffering in this world and negate the spirit that is the essence of existence. Self-love propels them, flattery ignites their egos, pleasure and sensuality but givens as their rewards, lip service anticipated as they flaunt their entitlement to act without interference from those outside their exclusive club, nourished by vanity and intemperance, driven by madness and arrogance claiming “exceptionalism” as a birthright as they buy favors and privilege, stealing souls as larder for their enjoyment, scavengers on human kind finding in this world a banquet of riches for the few leaving the rest to the wasteland beyond the walls they have constructed to block out any memory of their evilness. The scars of Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq. This “Age of Fools” deserves more than a scolding, more than a reprimand, more than a chastisement for the world-wide wreckage they have inflicted; they deserve absolute castigation, nay more, damnation forever in the annals of human discourse, and I offer in poems and in polemics my attempt to stamp that damnation on all the fools that have created the bloodshed, the mayhem, the absolute chaos that has attended the innocents of the world by these beasts that have roamed the world without a soul. The offenses of these fools offend the sensibilities of common decency toward all humans even as they defy the guaranteed rights of all who live under the umbrella of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. Their minds and hence their actions are driven by demonic forces that cater to no one and nothing that interferes with their ultimate goals, goals which are anathema to the welfare of people everywhere. There is need to understand these forces that seize a mind, freeze it against its fellows and seal out the natural sympathies of the heart. There is also need to comprehend the process by which these madmen took control of the United States, pirating the ship of state to policies and acts contradictory to its stated principles, turning it into an oligarchic, belligerent fascist monstrosity that sails the oceans of the world plundering all without mercy, a veritable Ship of Fools. To that end I offer this guide that we might track the deception as the Bush administration and its attendant fools began this corrosive and calculated destruction of the United States of America in the first decade of this new century. Men of War Are men who rise to power born to the task, Offspring of some primordial curse, Children of the first conflagration That raged in the recesses of the universe, Dividing creation into the twin Charons of Heaven and Hell? Do they divine their dominion in the dungeon of despair, And glower in delight at the magnitude of their power, Monarchs of the souls harvested there? Are they the demon riders of the red horses Let loose by the breaking of the second seal? Have they orders from some terrible force To take peace from the earth, to slay their brethren That the prophecy of ancient stories be fulfilled? Or are they the horsemen of the fourth seal Riding the winds of war, spreading disease and destruction Across the sands and the seas and the cities That dot the earth? Or are they men devoid of heart, defective and deformed, Whose chest is filled with cynicism and contempt For those less fortunate, the desperate and deprived That struggle to survive in a world unkind? What manner of men can distance themselves from their kin? What beast of prey have they become to devour so many Without compassion or remorse, able to wield Weapons of unimaginable force against unseen foes, Who hear the screaming cry of the angel of death Hurtling from the sky, Where life itself should be the only force: The warmth of the sun, the gentle cooling of the rain, The promise of spring, the hope that comes again. Listen to those who conspire behind closed doors the destiny of men; See how they huddle amongst themselves, laughing to scorn The voices of those who council patience and restraint, Who caution against gut reaction, the antidote to passion, The enemy of due deliberation that considers consequences That destroy those we would save. Listen as they conspire, like Richard of old, to create their empire On the ruins of ancient castles and tombs, The graphic symbols of life and death, Oblivious to the reality they portray as they plot their rise to power. Witness the arrogance that leaves a legacy of lost memories, Where preservation is weakness and destruction is might. Where once the silent dreams of ancient voices scrolled their beauty Before our eyes, moist with sympathy for their expectations, Recognizing our dreams in theirs though centuries have passed, Now they smolder, thoughts lost forever, The very glory and magnificence of Mesopotamia. These are the men who dismiss the misfortune of others, Ignorant of causes that curse a culture Into ruin by the ravages of time or wind or drought, Leaving generations destitute and deprived, innocent detritus of wasted days, Hostages of happenstance, fodder for the selfish, the savage, and the strong. These are the men who have contempt for the poor, Who understand weakness as evil, might as right, Lies, deceit, and duplicity as strength against failure, Who believe empathy, kindness, and compassion betray success, Allowing the weak to survive as parasites on the strong, And strain the juice of ambition from their loin. Memory that gives life to identity must be destroyed By those who conquer, or it will destroy the myths That gave them purpose in their slaughter. The baubles and slogans parroted by the powerful Become the voice of reason and the spirit of violence To subdue the weak and extol the strong, And death becomes the gauge of success. Morality lies dead beneath the sword of arrogance, Slain by the seven angels of Revelation, The ministers of god’s messenger, Who unleash heaven’s candles to open the bottomless pit, Spewing spasms of smoke back to the heavens, Blocking the light of the sun, Casting darkness over the faces of men, Even as the locusts’ wings whirl their fury Over the frightened hordes below who suffer the scorpion’s blow. This must we know of those who rule by myth: Their truth is imbedded in an icy heart Frozen in time to a god of vengeance and retaliation, Whose mission they serve by fulfilling their ambition, And in that heartless world they find meaning. “NBC and ABC’s Sunday news shows turned to discredited architects of the Iraq War to opine on the appropriate U.S. response to growing violence in Iraq, without acknowledging their history of deceit and faulty predictions,” Media Matters’ Emily Arrowood opined, citing specifically the return to the airwaves of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol (who never really disappeared from the talk show circuit in the first place). “If you were asked to identify a single moment that best captures the failure of elite media outlets to act as agents of accountability, you could do worse than David Gregory asking Paul Wolfowitz on “Meet the Press” this weekend what we should do, “as a policy matter,” to deal with the deteriorating situation in Iraq,” Salon’s Simon Maloy vented. Maloy goes on to rend garments over the gall of The Wall Street Journal daring to provide former head of the Iraqi occupation authority L. Paul Bremmer space in the opinion pages to weigh in on the crisis. “Their argument for taking them seriously is to ignore everything they’ve said up to this point,” the Salon columnist continued. Finally, Maloy questions why American society has not whisked these and other prominent figures of the Bush-era off to the Leper Caves. There are no consequences for being so wrong all the time. Kristol and Wolfowitz and all the other people responsible for dragging us into Iraq should be pariahs who labor under the expectation of doing some measure of atonement for their stubborn and wrongheaded pursuit of a disastrous policy. Instead they get invited on to Sunday shows to discuss what we should do next in Iraq. “[P]eople who both supported the invasion, and believe further military involvement is the right course now,” The New Republic’s Brian Beutler wrote, crafting a slightly more thoughtful version of the Maloy’s take. “They should be regarded with incredible skepticism, and not simply because of the magnitude of their initial mistake.” [I]t’s crucial for everyone to recognize that double-down interventionists have much more on the line than a desire to provide accurate, dispassionate risk assessments, and to price that into their arguments. We should set the bar for those arguments very high. Unfortunately, the substantive dispute about Iraq still lies on a largely partisan axis, and because the country elected and re-elected a president who was right in the first instance, the “opposition” is now composed of people who blew it over a decade ago. And so they’re the ones getting calls from reporters and network news producers looking for a fresh take today. At least Beutler took a stab at informing his readers as to why they should be skeptical of the pronouncements of the Iraq War’s architects, but that is not the same as a case for their self-censorship. These and others who populate social media with similar self-assured sermons denouncing the Iraq War architects’ self-assuredness are so utterly convinced that Bush allies should disappear in disgrace that they often fail to assert why. “Why?” they bristle. There is no need to even dignify such an impertinent question with a response. History itself has repudiated the Iraq War’s supporters, they claim. Majority opinion in virtually every major institution in American – from government, to entertainment, to media, to academia – all are quite convinced that the Iraq War was folly from beginning to end, and cutting America’s losses was the only option available to Obama. In fact, this consensus among America’s influencer caste has dulled the arguments of those whose very political identities were shaped amid the debate over Iraq. The Iraq War’s architects were self-evidently wrong, the closed circle assures itself. That fact alone should relegate them to the black list. And the Iraq War architects issued many a faulty prediction, but wrongness alone on the complex issue of post-war Iraqi security is not really a disqualifier for this crowd. Obama, too, crafted and applied a demonstrably failed post-war model for Iraq. As Mary Katharine Ham observed on Monday evening, Obama’s December, 2011 speech at Fort Bragg announcing the completion of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is riddled with “mission accomplished” moments. “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people,” Obama insisted. He contradicted himself just last week when he scolded Nouri al-Maliki’s administration for excluding the country’s Sunni minority from enjoying full representation. “And around the globe, as we draw down in Iraq, we have gone after al Qaeda so that terrorists who threaten America will have no safe haven, and Osama bin Laden will never again walk the face of this Earth,” Obama added. According to Obama’s former acting CIA director Mike Morell, among ISIS’s goals is the formation of a state-like entity secure enough to facilitate the planning and execution of attacks on Americans in the United States. On Sunday, the president informed Congress that he was sending nearly 300 combat-ready American troops back to Iraq to provide security for American embassy staff. They are considering additional measures which include airstrikes and an insertion of special forces to provide Iraqi troops with training. While the mission is circumspect, the promise Obama made to the American people to extricate them from Iraq’s domestic affairs is a failed one by any objective measure. True, Obama might not have been drawn back into Iraq if the 2003 invasion had never occurred, though we are so removed from that event that any number of other factors could have intervened in the interim. History alone suggests that it unlikely that Obama would have been the first president since Reagan to avoid military conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But it’s just as true that, had the president executed strikes on Syria in 2013 to pursue his stated aim of containing that conflict, Obama’s current predicament in Mesopotamia may also have been avoided. Obama’s obviously failed approach to Iraq does not lead Obama’s supporters to demand his exile. The demand that people like Kristol and Wolfowitz disappear is not based in a noble regard for realist foreign policy. It is an expression of the increasingly desperate effort to hold on to a formative weltanschauung, one which was forged in Iraq and is now dying there.

A decade ago, the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq on the premise that the country was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Despite worldwide protest and a lack of UN authorization, 200,000 thousand troops deployed into Iraq in March of 2003, following massive airstrikes. The coalition faced minimal opposition, and Baghdad quickly fell. For years after President George W. Bush's "mission accomplished" speech, the war raged on, fueled by sectarian conflicts, al Qaeda insurgencies, outside agencies, and mismanagement of the occupation. Ten years later, we look back in a three-part series. Today's entry focuses on the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq, and the weeks immediately following. Smoke covers Saddam Hussein's presidential palace compound during a massive US-led air raid on Baghdad, Iraq on March 21, 2003. Allied forces unleashed a devastating blitz on Baghdad, triggering giant fireballs and deafening explosions and sending huge mushroom clouds above the city center. Missiles slammed into the main palace complex of President Saddam Hussein on the bank of the Tigris River, and key government buildings.(Ramzi Haidar/AFP/Getty Images) 2 U.S. President George W. Bush, watched by Vice President Dick Cheney, speaks before signing a $355 billion military spending bill in the Rose Garden of the White House October 23, 2002. The bill gave the Pentagon a nearly $40 billion boost as it prepared for possible war with Iraq, the White House said. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque) # 3 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, center, talks with elite Republican Guard officers in Baghdad, on March 1, 2003. Iraq began destroying its Al Samoud 2 missiles Saturday as ordered by the United Nations and agreed with weapons inspectors on a timetable to dismantle the entire missile program, U.N. and Iraqi officials said. (AP Photo/INA) # 4 Iraqi soldiers march in the courtyard of the Martyrs Monument in Baghdad, on February 16, 2003. (Reuters/Suhaib Salem) # 5 Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial he said could contain anthrax as he presents evidence of Iraq's alleged weapons programs to the United Nations Security Council in this February 5, 2003 photo. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola) # 6 Protests against war in Iraq erupted around the world in March of 2003. This combination photo shows (from top left) large demonstrations in Madrid, New York, Jakarta, Calcutta, Rome, (2nd row) London, Berlin, Marseille, San Francisco, and Montevideo. (Credit, in same order: Reuters, AP Photo/Louis Lanzano, Reuters/Pipit Prahara, Reuters/Sucheta Das, Reuters/Giampiero Sposito, Reuters/Peter Macdiarmid, AP Photo/Franka Bruns, AP Photo/Claude Paris, AP Photo/Noah Berger, and AP Photo/Marcelo Hernandez) # 7 British Royal Air Force personnel wait in a bunker wearing full Nuclear Biological and Chemical suits after a warning of a Scud missile attack on their base in Kuwait March 20, 2003. (Reuters/Russell Boyce) # 8 U.S. President George W. Bush announced the start of war between the United States and Iraq during a televised address from the Oval Office, on March 19, 2003. The United States said it had began its war against Iraq just minutes after several explosions were heard over Baghdad. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque) # 9 US Marines from the 2nd battalion/8 MAR, prepare themselves after receiving orders to cross the Iraqi border at Camp Shoup, northern Kuwait, on March 20, 2003. (Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images) # 10 An explosion rocks Baghdad during air strikes on March 21, 2003. The attacks far exceeded strikes that launched the war the previous day, Reuters correspondents said. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic) # 11 An assault convoy of trucks and armored vehicles of the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team prepare to cross into Iraq, on March 21, 2003. (Reuters/US Army/Robert Woodward) # 12 An aviation ordnance man observes rows of bombs on the hangar bay of the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in the northern Gulf, on March 30, 2003. The carriers airwing flew 104 total sorties over Iraq on March 29, and dropped bombs on targets including air defense sites, a train loaded with tanks and a surface-to-air missile site. (Reuters/Paul Hanna) # 13 A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber returns from a mission over Iraq, after refueling from a KC-10 plane over the Black Sea, on March 28, 2003.(AP Photo/Jockel Finck) # 14 Palls of black smoke from raging oil fires billow over Baghdad, on March 27, 2003. The oil-filled trenches were set off by Iraqis to try and block the visibility of U.S. warplanes and missiles. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic) # 15 Soldiers from the 3rd Brigade of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division rest in foxholes by their convoy in a staging area in the Kuwaiti desert, on, March 21, 2003. (AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju) # 16 Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf reads a message to the Iraqi people from President Saddam Hussein broadcast on Iraqi television, April 1, 2003. In the message Saddam said that jihad was a religious duty and he urged the Iraqi people to fight invading U.S. and British troops wherever they found them. (Reuters/Iraqi television) # 17 An Iraqi officer is held by US Marines with India Company 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division following a gunfight at the headquarters of the Iraqi 51st and 32nd mechanized infantry divisions near Az Bayer, Iraq on March 21, 2003. (AP Photo/Laura Rauch) # 18 Coalition forces commander U.S. Army General Tommy Franks tells reporters that the military campaign is on track during a press conference in the media center at Camp As Sayliyah, outside Doha, Qatar, on March 30, 2003. (Reuters/Tim Aubry) # 19 Iraqi soldiers stand together with their arms raised, silhouetted against a sky covered with black smoke as they surrender to U.S. Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in southern Iraq, on March 21, 2003. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye) # 20 British Household Cavalry Scimitar tanks drive past burning oil wells in Southern Iraq, on March 20, 2003. (Reuters) # 21 U.S. Marine Lt. Ben Reid from 1/2 Charlie Company of Task Force Tarawa waits to be medivaced after being hit with shrapnel and a machine gun round, in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, on March 23, 2003. The Marines suffered a number of deaths and casualties during gun battles throughout the city. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) # 22 Iraqi civilians scream for help as they are caught in the crossfire while marines from the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit Fox Company "Raiders" push into southern Iraq to take control of the main port of Umm Qasr on March 21, 2003. (Reuters/Desmond Boylan) # 23 U.S. Marines from the 15 Marine Expeditionary Unit fire a shoulder-launched Javelin missile during a battle with Iraqi troops at the port in Umm Qasr, Iraq, on March 23, 2003. (AP Photo/Simon Walker, The London Times) # 24 U.S. Marines with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division, return fire after coming upon a mortar attack during an orange sandstorm on a road south of Baghdad, on March 26, 2003. (AP Photo/Laura Rauch) # 25 Ray Jacques reads the San Francisco Chronicle's war special section inside a Starbucks coffee shop in San Francisco, in this March 20, 2003 photo. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) # 26 A statue of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, at his palace, damaged during a U.S. led air strike in Baghdad, on March 23, 2003.(Reuters/Faleh Kheiber) # 27 Lit by Hummvee headlights, a soldier from the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division guards Iraqis who were intercepted during dust storm on the perimeter of the division's forward base in south Central Iraq, on March 26, 2003. (AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju) # 28 Two Iraqi children look through their window in New Baghdad, a suburb of Baghdad, on March 24, 2003. Oil fires burned across the city as a defense against incoming US missiles and bombs. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay) # 29 A U.S. Army combat engineer enjoys a cigarette as he relaxes between the cities of Najaf and Karbala as another sandstorm turned the daylight orange, on March 26, 2003. (Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach) # 30 A body of Iraqi man lies by the road side north of Al Nassiriyah, on March 25, 2003. More than 30 men of military age were killed on the key northern highway by an apparent U.S. air strike on the vehicles carrying the Iraqis. (Reuters/Damir Sagolj) # 31 A British Warrior armored combat vehicle knocks over a picture of Saddam Hussein in the city of Basra, in southern Iraq, on March 24, 2003. (Reuters/Mark Richards) # 32 In this image from video seen on Iraqi television on March 27, 2003, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein meets with high-ranking Ba'ath party officials. (AP Photo/Iraqi TV via APTN) # 33 An Iraqi soldier fires his AK-47 rifle into reeds on the banks of the Tigris river in Baghdad, on March 23, 2003 after reports that U.S. or British pilots may have ejected over the city. Television reports showed Iraqi soldiers shooting into the Tigris river and in boats, apparently searching the water for pilots. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic) # 34 U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman HM1 Richard Barnett, assigned to the 1st Marine Division, holds an Iraqi child in central Iraq, on March 29, 2003. Confused front line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family after local soldiers appeared to force civilians towards positions held by U.S. Marines. (Reuters/Damir Sagolj) # 35 A U.S. Army soldier atop a Humvee armed with a heavy machine gun secures an area by a burning oil well in Iraq's vast southern Rumaila oilfields, on March 30, 2003. U.S. engineers moved through the oilfields on Sunday shutting down wellheads in an operation that could take months to complete. (Reuters/Yannis Behrakis) # 36 U.S. Marines from Lima Company, a part of a 7-th Marine Regiment, walk in front of the Martyrs Monument, during an operation to secure securing the center of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. (Reuters/Oleg Popov) # 37 A wounded Iraqi girl is treated by U.S. marines in central Iraq, on March 29, 2003. The four-year old girl, blood streaming from an eye wound, was screaming for her dead mother, while her father, shot in a leg, begged to be freed from the plastic wrist cuffs slapped on him by U.S. marines, so he could hug his other terrified daughter. (Reuters/Damir Sagolj) # 38 Smoke billows from a building hit during coalition forces air raid in Baghdad, on Monday March 31, 2003. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay) # 39 An Iraqi man comforts his 4-year-old son at a regroupment center for POWs of the 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf, Iraq in this March 31, 2003 photo. The man was seized in An Najaf with his son and the U.S. military did not want to separate father and son.(AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju) # 40 The inside of the Sheraton Hotel, scene of alleged looting, in Basra, southern Iraq, on April 8, 2003. (Reuters/Simon Walker) # 41 U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld speaks to the press at a Pentagon briefing in Washington, April 9, 2003. Rumsfeld praised the progress of American-led forces fighting in Iraq but warned the fighting would continue and the military still needed to account for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. (Reuters/Rick Wilking) # 42 Kuwaiti firefighters secure a burning oil well in the Rumaila oilfields, on March 27, 2003, set ablaze by Iraqi military forces.(USMC/Mary Rose Xenikakis) # Warning: This image may contain graphic or objectionable content Click to view image 43 The charred remains of dead Iraqi soldiers lay outside a bus hit by a U.S. tank shell on a highway between Baghdad's international airport and the city center, on April 7, 2003. (Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach) # 44 The damaged "Al Mansur", Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's private yacht, anchored in central Basra, on April 10, 2003.(Reuters/Simon Walker) # 45 Six-year-old Tyler Jordan is hugged by his mother Amanda while U.S. Army Chaplain Captain David Nott looks on during the funeral of the boy's father, United States Marine Gunnery Sgt. Philip Jordan, at Holy Family Church in Enfield, Connecticut, on April 2, 2003. Sgt. Jordan was killed during fighting outside Nasiriyah on March 23 in the early days of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. (Reuters/Chip East) # 46 A U.S. Marine covers the face of a statue of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with a U.S. flag in Baghdad, on April 9, 2003. U.S. troops briefly draped an American flag over the face of a giant statue of Hussein, as they prepared to topple it in front of a crowd of Iraqis.(Reuters/Goran Tomasevic) # 47 Iraqi Kurds wave banners and U.S. and British flags in the northern Iraqi town of Dohuk, on April 9, 2003, to celebrate the arrival of U.S. led coalition forces' in Baghdad. Iraqi Kurds shouted for joy and fired in the air on Wednesday after U.S. forces entered Baghdad. "It's all over in Baghdad," said 29-year-old Rafiq Baway, who heard the news on satellite TV in the city of Sulaimaniya. He believed it would lead to the fall of Kirkuk, the northern oil hub where Kurds accuse Saddam of expelling Kurdish inhabitants and replacing them with Arabs.(Reuters) # 48 U.S. Marine helicopters patrol the skies over Baghdad, on April 13, 2003. (Reuters/Gleb Garanich) # 49 President Bush gives a thumbs-up sign after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, on May 1, 2003. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) # 50 Smoke from burning oil fires set ablaze by Iraqis as a shield against incoming missiles and air raids obscures Baghdad, on April 1, 2003.(AP Photo/Jerome Delay)