For sure, the “softly-softly” approach taken by American and British forces to minimize civilian casualties from allied bombing has slowed down the progress of Western forces. But the Western media has been guilty of excessive cheer leading, which has misled public opinion in Britain and the US. Last Friday, March 21, Sky News kept reporting that the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr had been “liberated” by US-UK forces. Then suddenly on Saturday, Sky News transmitted three hours of live coverage from Umm Qasr, where US Marines were facing stiff resistance from Iraqis. Only bombing from US-UK planes helped in the end to secure the town.

On Sunday, Iraqi Television had a scoop when it broadcast interviews with five US prisoners of war. Al-Jazeera picked up the transmission and rebroadcast it to the world, erroneously slapping its “Exclusive” label onto it. I watched in horrified fascination as each soldier was asked by the Iraqi TV reporter where they were from, why they had come to Iraq, and what they thought of the Iraqi people. Two of them looked terrified, while the others just looked mad that they had been caught. Ironically, most of them were from Texas, the home state of US President George Bush, Jr.

Unsurprisingly, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and later President Bush, demanded that the Iraqis stop filming the American POWs, claiming this contravened the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of POWs. We could only smirk at the sheer audacity of the US demanding a double standard for its POWs, especially after its Al-Qaeda POWs were whisked from Afghanistan to Cuba more than a year ago, where they have been kept incommunicado ever since, with absolutely no rights, no access to visits from relatives, and certainly no protection from the Geneva Conventions.

If I were the parent of one of the American POWs, I would be desperate to see any pictures of my loved one. Despite this fact, all the US TV networks chickened out under the threat of legal action by Rumsfeld and broadcast only short snippets of the interviews, with no sound and with the faces of the POWs pixilated out. But the Pentagon wasn’t able to control other ways for the pictures to penetrate the US. Obviously, those in the US who subscribe to Al-Jazeera saw the interviews, but there were other satellite channels in the US that broadcast the pictures, unpixilated. The Filipino Channel was one of them, and it was while watching this channel in Las Vegas that the Filipino-American mother of one of the POWs happened to find out that her son was being held captive by the Iraqis.

On Monday, Iraqi TV scored another scoop when it showed an American Apache helicopter that had apparently been shot down near the city of Karbala by an Iraqi farmer with an ancient-looking rifle. It was the hilarious triumph of a low-tech and cheap weapon over that of a multimillion dollar, high-tech piece of advanced military equipment. The helicopter showed no signs of damage, which led many Western commentators to speculate for hours on end on how the farmer had managed to bring it down. In the end, all agreed that a bullet must have been shot right into one of the engines, a surefire way of downing any helicopter.

With its images of US POWs and downed American choppers, it was only a matter of time before the US targeted the transmission facilities of Iraqi TV. Sure enough, on Wednesday morning we all woke up to a blank screen on our satellite televisions when we tuned into the Iraqi TV channel. Overnight, the US had rained several cruise missiles onto Iraqi TV headquarters in Baghdad, reducing its transmission tower to a pile of smoldering rubble. Within hours, Iraqi engineers had a limited transmission up and working, including the international satellite service of Iraqi TV.

All of the stiff Iraqi resistance to advancing allied forces seems to prove the point that although many Iraqis may have no love lost on Saddam, they have united against the foreign aggressors. While most Iraqis, as well as most Arabs, know that the allied troops will probably manage to ultimately overthrow Saddam, they wonder at what cost to Americans and the British. The imperialistic action by the US and Britain does not sit well with Iraqis and Arabs in general, and any government installed by the occupiers in Baghdad is going to lack political legitimacy and popular backing.

Muslims around the world are praying for the safety of all Iraqis. This unilateral invasion by the US and Britain, with no United Nations backing, leaves many Muslims wondering if their country will be next if they don’t heed American demands. Hawks in America will applaud this feeling of mass insecurity in the Muslim world, claiming that the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington give America the right to root out “terrorism” wherever it wants around the world.

The fact remains that US-UK troops still haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though they are clearly desperate to do so in order to validate Bush’s claims of links between Saddam’s regime and the Al-Qaeda terror network. An American friend of mine, who once worked with the first President Bush, and is a staunch Republican, told me that there were strong links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. When I asked her why the US government had not revealed what these supposed links were, she couldn’t give me an answer.

The whole world is watching every single move of the US and Britain in Iraq during the war, and will certainly continue to do so after the conflict is over. Any sort of hidden, imperialistic agenda will be quickly sniffed out, and I think Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are acutely aware of this. US Secretary of State Colin Powell keeps insisting that US/UK forces are in Iraq to liberate and rebuild the country and not to destroy it. It will take immense amounts of confidence-building measures to overcome the natural fears of the Iraqi people who have been colonized many times in the past. The US and Britain better show more willingness to stick to the long haul ahead than they did in Afghanistan.(rasheed@arabnews.com)