Just before it begins, Hani Shukrallah on what is really unique about this war (Al-Ahram Weekly, March 20-26, 2003):
With 280,000 US and British troops deployed in the Gulf -- 175,000 are in Kuwait -- US military commanders were promising a war "unlike anything anyone has ever seen before," according to the US naval commander in the Gulf, Vice Admiral Timothy Keating. Speaking to reporters on board USS Abraham Lincoln, Keating waxed poetic on the forthcoming invasion. The coalition troops would go "about this particular conflict . . . in a way that is very unpredictable and unprecedented in history -- remarkable speed, breathtaking speed, agility, precision and persistence" . . . .
On board USS Abraham Lincoln, Admiral Keating addressed hundreds of his men telling them: "When it's all done... and they rewrite history, because that is what you are going to do, your names will be written in gold on those pages."
Before that gilding begins history will have to be effaced, not rewritten. An illegal war waged in blatant violation of the UN Charter and of international law; a war against which 30 million people throughout the world have already demonstrated before a single shot is fired on streets from Los Angeles to Tokyo; a war to which opinion polls in virtually all the world's nations, with the exception of the US and Israel, have produced a definitive 'no' -- how can such a war be recorded except in infamy? And this, before the body count.