Stardate 20030409.0229

(On Screen): It's got to be damned tough right now being a leftist antiwar columnist. Everything went wrong – which is to say, nothing went wrong. There doesn't seem to have been any mass slaughter of civilians. The Americans stupidly refused to carpet-bomb Baghdad. The war went rapidly, and coalition casualties are extremely light. The bombs which have been dropped have stubbornly insisted on actually hitting what they were aimed at; none of them seems to have gone off course and hit an orphanage or an old people's home. Some days it just seems as if there's hardly any point in getting out of bed.

And what is now coming out about life in Iraq, and the way that the Iraqis are beginning to greet the invading army, is beginning to make it look as if they're actually the good guys; it's beginning to look a whole lot like liberation rather than brutal conquest. Facing all of that, it's got to be damned tough trying to find some way of proving that you were right all along and that the war really, truly, was wrong – and still is.

Of course, there's one easy way to do it: ignore all the evidence. See what you want to see; dismiss all the rest as being propaganda manufactured by the coalition. And, of course, it is a foregone conclusion that there's no moral equivalence between the two sides. Naturally not! How can there be equivalence when it's obvious that the Americans and British are much worse than Saddam's regime?

On the separate question of whether Iraqi acts of war are on a par with those of the coalition, the answer is also simple. Ours are sometimes worse. The spectre of chemical attack remains, but, amid Iraqi Scuds unfired and bio-weapons undiscovered, reality trumps fear. The cluster-bombing of civilians by an invading force proclaiming its superior power is an outrage against humanity and the Geneva Convention.

In order to prove your case, all you have to do is to make up coalition atrocities. It's obvious that using cluster bombs on civilians is a terrible crime. Never mind that the coalition hasn't actually done such a thing; that doesn't matter.

And, of course, any event in the war which seemed to be good news, a sign of coalition bravery and dedication, must necessarily have been unnecessary and actually brutal.

We, by contrast, are invited to despise the independent al-Jazeera, condemned by Mr Blunkett as a Saddam tool, and soak up good news images. Ignore the nastiness and think instead of the brave 'rescue' of Private Jessica Lynch from the hospital ward where she was being treated with all available medical skill.

So we talk about the "rescue" because in fact she didn't need to be rescued. She was in a hospital ward and being treated with all available medical skill. Thus the raid was a brutal and foolish waste of time.

Private Lynch was being treated, alright. She was being tortured. Mary Riddell, of The Observer, doesn't want to hear about that fact; it's inconvenient.

At least two different Iraqis were so horrified by it that they told the Americans.

Marine officers confirmed at least the outlines of Mohammed’s vivid account, which he gave to reporters for The Washington Post and USA Today before he dropped from sight. (At least two other possible sources for information about Lynch’s location were rumored last week. One was an Iraqi man who approached NBC reporter Kerry Sanders, traveling with the Eighth Marine Division, to say that an American woman was being held at the hospital, adding: “She’s being tortured.” And intelligence sources in Washington say the CIA independently came up with information pinpointing her location.) The 32-year-old lawyer said he was visiting his wife, a hospital nurse, when he became curious about the profusion of agents guarding the emergency wing. A doctor friend showed him the room where the heavily bandaged Lynch was being held.

Based on their information, a raid was hastily planned, and a group from the Delta Force went in after her. And while they were there, they also retrieved 11 corpses, nine of which later were found to be American soldiers. They'd been buried in unmarked graves, and the soldiers had to dig with their bare hands to retrieve them. That has to have been an extremely grisly job.

Private Lynch's injuries were quite severe.

And amid the joy there were unsettling questions about Lynch’s condition and her treatment in captivity. Her injuries included fractures to both legs, her right arm and spine, and after undergoing several operations last week she developed a fever that reached 104. Exactly how she was injured, though, remained a mystery; the commander of the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, told reporters on Friday that “she was not stabbed; she was not shot.” Later that day, though, surgeons discovered that she had been shot—and, according to a family spokesman in West Virginia, Dan Little, her wounds were “consistent with low-velocity small arms.”

Which is to say, a low-powered pistol; something that no one in their right mind would select as a weapon when laying an ambush for a group of Americans in a convoy.

But it's exactly the kind of hand gun you'd use if you wanted to shoot someone and be pretty sure you wouldn't kill t