Suicide Bombing Killed 4 U.S. Soldiers

Eleven days into the invasion of Iraq, the allied forces strengthened their attack on major facilities in Iraq yesterday. But the ground forces, which had not been properly supplied, stopped moving forward 70 km south of Baghdad and waited.

Major U.S. media including the Washington Post reported that the political imperative of waging a short and decisive campaign was increasingly at odds with the military necessity of preparing for a protracted, more violent and costly war.

Amid a series of massive bombardment, a missile landed in a marketplace in Western Baghdad in the evening of March 28. The missile attack killed 62 civilians and wounded 107 more.

The Iraqi government blamed allied forces of “war crimes”, but the British government suggested the possibility that a surface-to-air missile of the Iraqi military might be dropped due to malfunctioning.

In the afternoon of March 29, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden taxi at a U.S. checkpoint near the contested city of Najaf, killing four U.S. soldiers in the first such attack of the war.

As the Iraqi Republican Guard has moved south, the U.S. Defense Department has revised its strategy for a ground war and said that it would deploy the second armored unit to Iraq earlier than scheduled.

U.S. President George W. Bush said in his weekly radio address on the 29th that the current war was intense and no one knew how long it would last, suggesting that his government was preparing for a protracted war.

Meanwhile, Newsweek conducted a public opinion poll on the approval rating of President Bush on the 27th and 28th. The poll showed that Bush`s approval rating is at 68%, up 15% from two weeks ago, recording its highest ever level in six months.

The state-owned TV in Iraq televised Iraqi President Saddam Hussein presiding over a cabinet meeting on March 29 and reported that participants strongly expressed their confidence in victory.

In the meantime, Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix said on the same day that allied forces had so far failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

sechepa@donga.com