The most frightening thing I've seen in years: CBS morning news personality and "Big Brother" host Julie Chen dressed in fatigues, reporting from an undisclosed location in the Persian Gulf. This whole embedding (how creepy is it that "embedding" is a managerial term as well, as I reported last week after our monthly library staff meetings. I can't wait for Donald Rumsfeld to start talking about "low-hanging fruit"!) of American journalists with military units is a joke. I have no problem with propagandistic puff pieces during wartime, but for all of the major news organizations based in the United States to pull their independently operating correspondents out of the war zone and rely solely on embedded reporters - who aren't allowed to tell us anything the military doesn't want us to know - while other countries' press, including the Brits mind you, are still alive and reporting from downtown Baghdad says a lot about the sorry state of the American media. At least during the first Gulf War we had CNN sticking it out in Iraq when the bombs started falling, while all of the other news agencies allowed themselves to be sequestered and handled by the Pentagon, who spoon-fed them a steady stream of generic "smart bomb" footage and precious little else.

Random thought: Is it just me, or does anyone else expect to see a Jawa sand crawler in the distance, whenever we cut to the "Live From The Iraqi Desert" footage?

I've decided to root for the Kurds during this war, especially after hearing the news that Turkey has authorized its troops to make a foreign incursion into Northern Iraq so that they can secure the Kurdish territories and prevent the birth of an independent "Kurdistan", a rider to the Turkish Parliamentary resolution allowing the Americans the right to fly through Turkish airspace (which is a far cry from the original plan, which would have allowed the U.S. to send ground troops into Turkey in order to attack the Iraqis from the north) that got virtually no press here in America. A pity, because the Kurds have gotten the shaft so many times during the past few decades, and really deserve a homeland of their own at this point. The Turks should know better at this point, too, having spent the last few centuries trying to screw its former Ottoman subjects out of their fair share of rightful territory, only to be forced to spend decades afterwards fighting until they have to give up everything they should have in the first place, and then some. Greece is the perfect paradigm here. The Ottomans did everything they could (as did the Western powers) to ensure that an independent "Kingdom of Greece" would be a rump state, a mere fraction of the Greek-occupied lands, and a tiny sliver of the whole Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean. As good an idea as it seemed to the Ottoman Porte at the time, the Greeks immediately made it their business to add to their artificially small nation, until Greeks and Turks ended up going to war on and off again for the better part of a century. Mark my words, the same thing will happen with the Kurds, unless Turkey wises up and lets the Kurdish people have what should have been theirs many, many moons ago.

Is Saddam dead? It's entirely possible, following a surprise opening salvo from our side that sought to catch and kill the Iraqi leader in one of his bunkers. Is it legal to specifically target another nation's head of state, war or no war? No one's questioned the legality of the attack, as far as I know, but there's no doubt we'd be howling bloody murder if Saddam tried to do the same thing to our capo. The idea of whacking another country's leader with a Tomahawk missle or a bunker-busting bomb is just a little too Tony Soprano for my tastes. Speaking of guys named Tony, apparently our "Coalition of the Willing" partner Tony Blair wasn't too happy about our attempted hit, either, of which he wasn't informed until the deed was done. Poor English war hawks. They really thought we cared about them, didn't they? All the Brits did was provide a thin veneer of multilateral respectability until the bombs started falling, at which point we started treating them like the rest of the world - come along for the ride if you'd like, but don't think for a second that your opinion really matters to us.