NO, IT'S NOTHING LIKE VIET NAM. YOU'VE BEEN TOLD. NOW MOVE ALONG.

Robert Fisk from Baghdad on the latest attempt to capture Saddam Hussein:

Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants.

The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.

Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April - whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him."

Two civilians, both believed to have been driving with their families, were brought to the Yarmouk, one with abdominal wounds and the other with "his brain outside of his head", according to another doctor.

Oh no, this is nothing like Viet Nam. Not at all. And the soldiers coming home will be secure in the knowledge they were serving such a noble cause. That's why they kicked the shit out of a Japanese reporter who filmed the aftermath of this botched raid.
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