Americans dig in and wait, bombing goes on [Failures and setbacks plague war effort]

BAGHDAD, March 30 (Reuters) - U.S. troops dug in south of Baghdad on Sunday, preparing to wait for weeks before resuming their advance on Saddam Hussein's heavily defended capital.

But as American warplanes, missiles and artillery pounded Iraqi Republican Guard positions around the city, General Tommy Franks insisted the U.S. and British invasion to overthrow the president was "on plan" and there was no "operational pause."

U.S. officers and soldiers in some units in the field south of Baghdad -- some are just 100 km (60 miles) away -- told Reuters they had orders to dig in for at least two weeks to give U.S. airpower and artillery a chance to grind down its defences.

Failure to break into the southern city of Basra after a week's siege may also have forced a rethink of military plans.

Franks, briefing the media at his Qatar headquarters, said, however, the war in the air and on the ground would continue its "remarkable" progress. He denied any pause and said infantry reinforcements heading for Kuwait were all part of his plan.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in Washington: "We have no plans for pauses or ceasefires."

Franks was asked if the 11-day-old war, which the U.S. vice-president said would last "weeks not months," could now stretch into summer; he would say only: "One never knows."

His boss in Washington, General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the hardest part was yet to come and warned patience was required:

"We can afford to take our time and set the conditions on the battlefield, whether that battlefield is the Republican Guard divisions now arrayed south of Baghdad, or whether those conditions are in Baghdad proper," Myers told the BBC.

Financial investors and world oil markets have been anxious to see the disruption to business and costs of the war kept in check. A long battle for Baghdad could hurt the world economy.

Saddam has vowed to make a bloody stand and inflict huge losses on the American and British invaders in street fighting.

An Iraqi military spokesman, hailing Saturday's suicide bomb that killed four American soldiers, said 4,000 willing "martyrs" from across the Arab world were already in Baghdad to fight.

Saddam has appealed to fellow Muslims to wage a jihad, or holy war, against the Americans and their allies -- the sort of possibility that persuaded many of U.S. President George W. Bush's allies to argue that war would provoke wider violence.

Iraqi resistance has surprised the invaders in southern towns like the presumed anti-Saddam Shi'ite strongholds of Basra and Najaf, prompting calls for U.S. reinforcements and a rethink of tactics. Australia's defence minister said his U.S. allies had "underestimated" the strength of Iraqi irregular units.

British troops around Basra are calling on their experience of fighting Irish guerrillas in Belfast. A spokesman said marines fought Iraqi paramilitaries and captured a general but were still not advancing into the embattled city of 1.5 million.

The difficulties in Basra could be a discomfiting foretaste of the perils facing the invaders in Baghdad.

British troops abandoned efforts to stop hundreds of frantic people trying to get back into Basra to feed hungry relatives.

In Baghdad, the air and artillery bombardment was at its fiercest on Saturday and Sunday, with targets struck both in the centre and on the southern outskirts.

Air raid sirens keened across the city and black smoke from oil trenches, set alight to thwart U.S. air raids, blanketed the sky. U.S. officials said their forces had bombed a training site for paramilitary Fedayeen, a presidential palace, intelligence complex and surface-to-air missile sites in Baghdad.

U.S. forces just north of Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad, shelled and mortared Iraqi troops near a bridge over the Euphrates river overnight. Near Kerbala, American rockets and artillery also targeted Iraqi Republican Guard positions.

A soldier supervising the ammunition column to U.S. forces further east told Reuters he was supplying thousands of the most powerful high-explosive 155 mm howitzer shells to the front. The most used shell was a version that showers smaller bomblets over a wide area, decimating infantry dug in along defensive lines.

In contrast, there has been relatively little close fighting and American soldiers said they had been told to halt.

"There is a realisation that we came in a little light," one frontline officer told his men. A Reuters correspondent with the troops heard an officer tell them the halt may last 35-40 days, far longer than a four-six day pause mentioned on Saturday.

Another Reuters correspondent watched soldiers dig deeper trenches and lay mines around their camp in central Iraq: "It looks like they are going to be in this position for at least two weeks," the correspondent quoted a sergeant as saying.

"They're going to send in the aircraft to do the work before the grunts (infantry) go in," the sergeant said.

Supply lines running 350 km (200 miles) back to Kuwait are stretched -- rations are short at the front -- and vulnerable to guerrillas, as Saturday's suicide bomb showed. Even in friendly Kuwait, an attacker drove a truck at soldiers on Sunday, injuring as many as 15 troops who had been lining up at a shop.

U.S. reinforcements are on the way -- 100,000 to add to the 125,000 already in Iraq, Washington officials said last week. The Fourth Infantry Division, blocked from opening a planned northern front by Turkish obstruction, is sailing toward Kuwait.

But Franks denied suggestions the Pentagon was too bullish in its assessment of how many troops it needed to break Saddam.

At least 36 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war began, 104 were wounded, seven taken prisoner and 17 missing.

The official British death toll is 23, only four in combat and the rest in accidents. Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill estimated Iraqi combat casualties were in the thousands. Iraq says nearly 600 civilians have died since March 20.

Seeking to counter criticism of the U.S. war effort by military analysts and the media, officials from Bush downwards began emphasising the harshness of Saddam's rule and defending their tactics against suggestions they under-estimated Iraq.

One man who sheltered from a street battle in the town of Kifl, south of Baghdad, spoke for many ordinary Iraqis who find it hard to like the invaders: "The Iraqis do not love foreigners coming to our country with their guns," said Nasir Hasnawi.

"They say they will leave when they change the government, but we do not believe them. I think they want our oil."

While American and British public opinion has swung behind their forces, international protests continued over the weekend.

On Sunday, 100,000 marched in Jakarta, Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. And 150,000 joined India's biggest anti-war protest to date, some burning effigies of Bush.

He Pledges his Allegiance to the Left

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I don't find it particularly amusing that the press was blatantly lying to us about what was going on over there.

I'm also not amused that they attempted to undermine the credibility of the coalition leadership by making up facts. "The General says this, but we here at Reuters can tell you that it's actually that."

This is not an opinion piece. Nor is it represented to be speculation. This is an alleged news story, peppered with quotations from, well, they never really say.

It will not always be true that members of the public can see for themselves what is going on, or that events will unfold so rapidly that the ax-grinding of media ideologists is so thoroughly exposed.

For most things going on around the world, we are still stuck with these so-called "journalists" who purport to tell us what's going on. But now we've seen that they are liars -- not just Reuters, nearly all of them -- and that they are pumping whatever bilge they think will bring us around to their political beliefs.

The exposure of the so-called mainstream press as a propaganda organ for the anti-war, anti-American left will, I believe, turn out to be the most significant domestic effect of this war.

The ability of this same media to sell the Democratic Party's candidates in the upcoming election has been dealt a severe blow. They will perform the same behaviors, and even read us the same 'push polls' to demonstrate the coming Democratic victory, but now we've seen that we can't trust these people to tell us the truth. They are liars and propagandists, and they just got caught. Big time.

The other area of reporting we need to be skeptical about is in the area of our economy. The media outlets known to be liberal in regard to politics are nearly always totally negative about our economy. They bash and bash and bash. They go out of their way to make good news into bad news. They know that they can only defeat this President now through economic means and I believe they are trying to create an atmosphere where people are afraid to buy, invest, etc., and I believe they would gladly welcome a recession, depression or whatever to take down President Bush. That is their goal. Readers of economic news had better think for themselves. Do not trust the news outlets you know to be leftist-liberal to give you the truth in respect to anything. Educate yourself and seek a variety of views.

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