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The shock, the awe, the deaths

SUNDAY HERALD
The Iraqi generals were given a stark choice: start surrendering your divisions or face the full might of a massive aerial bombardment. In the days leading up to the first attacks on Baghdad, the CIA had been in contact with senior army officers thought to be flaky and unsure whether or not to throw in the towel in the face of overwhelming US military pressure. Cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses had been intercepted and secure lines of communication created to build up the generals' confidence. Even when the first missiles started falling on Baghdad early on Thursday morning, targeting Saddam Hussein and his entourage, the secret talks continued. And on Friday, when coalition ground forces started streaming across the southern Iraqi border,
surrender talks were in full flow between dissidents and the headquarters of the US commander in the Gulf, General Tommy Franks.
'We're in face-to-face talks with Republican Guard commanders,' admitted a US official. 'Now it's up to them -- the scale and intensity of the bombardment will be in accordance with the surrender talks.'
In Washington and London, the political message from US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was that the full force of war had not been applied; that there was still time for a positive reaction from the Iraqis. By lunchtime on Friday, it was obvious that the pressure was not working and that the Iraqis would be bombed to the negotiating table. All along the necklace of bases that surround Iraq, warplanes were made ready with their deadly precision bombs
-- British Tornado and US navy Super Hornet strike aircraft leading the attack. In the waters of the Gulf, co-ordinates had been fed into the computers of the Cruise missiles which would be fired from surface ships and submarines. And at RAF Fairford, in the normally quiet Gloucestershire countryside, huge amounts of ordnance were loaded onto the giant B-52 bombers which began lumbering into the air in the late morning for the 16-hour round trip to Baghdad. Iraqis living in the capital who had access to satellite television knew what was going to hit them even before the bombers arrived.
When the attack came out of the early evening sky over Baghdad, the 'shock and awe' tactics were both shocking and dreadful. Long predicted -- the coalition forces used 1000 Cruise missiles and an equal number of smart bombs --
the display of modern aerial firepower was terrifying and, for those on the receiving end, awful. It was also deadly. Although post-battle assessments are incomplete, up to 300 Iraqis are thought to have become casualties in the firestorm -- most were migrant workers from India and Bangladesh -- and whole swathes of the Iraqi capital were flattened. Astoundingly, given the intensity of the raids, the main residential areas on the left bank of the River Tigris were left unscathed. Asked whether or not the operation had succeeded in its objective of producing sufficient terror to cow the Iraqi leadership, a US official dryly replied that faith in Saddam was starting to wane and that reports were coming in of commanders telling their soldiers to hunker down and wait for the opportunity to surrender to coalition forces.