Welcome to people who have come here looking for the Command Post blog. You can find it here.

Somehow I've become the top result for the Google search on that phrase.

John Zorn was supposed to be appearing at the Israel Festival this summer, but the word now is that there will only be local performers (report).

This Fatah suicide bomber was planning on blowing up a boarding school for children from abusive homes.

The Onion was lame this week.

Haaretz news flashes says that the Israeli defence establishment believes that Iraq has mobile scud launchers concealed under bridges where they can't be seen from above.

Ynet is saying that the Shiite Basra rebellion has been put down by Iraqi forces.

Via the Command Post, an article on Iraq's use of their own people as human shields. Funny how there's rarely a similar complaint about the Palestinians - given that they've have been doing the exact same thing for 2 years.

It would be interesting to hear a military perspective on how Israeli and American forces respectively deal with this tactic.

Barry Rubin describes his experience discussing the Iraq campaign as part of a television panel on an Arab network - and what he calls the "wall of lies" (here).

I really hope Salam is for real, but this could be the CIA:

today my father and brother went out to see what happening in the city, they say that it does look that the hits were very precise but when the missiles and bombs explode they wreck havoc in the neighborhood where they fall. Houses near al-salam palace(where the minister Sahaf took journalist) have had all their windows broke, doors blown in and in one case a roof has caved in. I guess that is what is called “collateral damage” and that makes it OK?

Or is it only Israelis who would think that describing minimal collateral damage constitutes propaganda?

From following the events of the Iraq war (and the house-to-house fighting in Nasiriya) at the Command Post blog, it appears that the coalition forces are putting their own troops at risk in order to minimize Iraqi civilian casualties. And it's clear that Iraq is not concerned about following the Geneva conventions with any POWs it obtains.

If this is a new paradigm for warfare, it was probably first seen with the Israeli assault on the "militants" in Jenin last year.

Some Israeli commentators think that the Ansar al-Islam organization - an Islamic group operating in northern Iraq and consisting of non-Iraqis - will cause problems for the US forces. (article).