Interesting distinction in that Chomsky piece between Preventive and Pre-emptive War… for some lighter reading, there’s a nice profile of the Chomsk from the New Yorker excerpted here.

As for the “facts,”it is good spin, but it’s not a long term solution for them, and could easily backfire, particularly if there is a lot of media focus on the problems of accuracy in counting the bodies.

As for the to and fro of ‘facts’ - it’s a good spin tactic, where you allow information to dribble out unchecked, revise it, negate it, issue conflicting statements, with the end result that no one can get a handle on what actually happens. Even the number 17 in your post is under constant revision. The Iraqis said it was 14 initially, Robert Fisk, who was on the scene pretty quickly, estimates 20. All these little discrepancies work in the favour of the US, as there is no truth or fact, just a bewildering array of possibilities that are cherry-picked by commentators depending on their allegiance. That said, most of the World at One today seemed to be meta-reporting of the problem of conflicting reports, rather than any attempt to assess the veracity of those reports.

What Victoria Clarke said strikes me as perfectly sensible - how else do you fight a war but by reacting to the enemy. The US are just taken aback that there is an ‘enemy.’ They seem genuinely to have believed that Iraq would just roll over and cheer the liberating troops, and now they have to take into account that there are significant numbers of troops loyal to Saddam Hussein, and that the Iraqi public might not be peachy keen on swapping a homegrown dictator for colonial overlords…