US soldiers wounded as Iraqi troops open fire from Red Crescent ambulance, our troops are attacked from a hospital, Saddam locates military targets next to civilian sites, the Fedayeen Saddam roam the country out of any uniform, soldiers are blown-up at a check-point, the white flag is used for cover of an ambush, Palestinian groups vow to send waves of suicide bombers to Iraq, Syria lets them board the bus and travel over the border, Arab media was, at the beginning of the war when even the Iraqis only had three or four civilian dead, already decrying the deaths of hundreds of civilians divorced from any reality on the ground, and the Arab world and media routinely applaud these unconventional attacks as heroic.


Peter Arnett said that reports of civilian deaths will help the anti-war movement back home, and he was right, although he shouldn't be.


The hand-wringing over civilian deaths, particularly in the Arab world, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Saddam knows civilian deaths sap the West's strength and enrage the Arabs (presumably because the deaths are caused by non-Arabs - the deaths caused by Arabs to other Arab civilians through the decades, though often orders of magnitude higher than anything seen to date in either Iraq or Israel has never caused this level of outrage). Certainly, he, his zealots and his allies in region, particularly the Palestinian terrorist groups, would not and have not hesitated to send civilians into harm's way (or pull the trigger themselves) for the sake of an effective camera shot.


The fact that Arab media reports are often used only to reinforce a pre-determined editorial line doesn't exactly reinforce Coalition resolve to keep putting soldiers in harm's way to avoid innocent casualties. Why sacrifice yourself for propaganda purposes when the media will report what they want to anyway? Fortunately, Western armies have their own moral compass that will inform what they do regardless, but message to the tragedy-mongers, both Arab and other: Be careful what you wish for.


In 1967, when the Israelis had smashed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground and were proceeding to smash their ground-forces, the Egyptian press and low-level commanders were continuing to spout the line about glorious Egyptian successes, long after such reports ceased to have any relation to reality. This caused a lot of people to make bad choices. For instance, in spite of warnings from the Israelis not to get involved, the Jordanians, buying what they heard from Egypt, shelled Israeli territory. In response, a lot of Jordanian troops were killed unnecessarily and the rest is history.


Certain terrorist groups and terrorist nations (Syria take note) are in danger of convincing themselves to make some bad choices again.


So, while the Arab press preys on Arab xeonophobia to get the people wound-up, lauds the "achievements" of fedayeen and looks for any chance to create or amplify any civilian tragedy...don't be surprised if we have a bit of trouble taking them seriously...and they get what they wish for.