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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
War in Iraq: U.S. Forces Control Baghdad's International Airport
Aired April 04, 2003 - 23:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(NEWSBREAK)
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Fredricka, thank you very much. See you in half an hour, appreciate that.
Baghdad on a Saturday morning and you can see the smoke over the city, some clouds over the city as well. Twelve miles away, the Americans control the airport on this Saturday morning.
You can hear some detonations, some explosions of some sort. I think you can still hear them rumbling through the Saturday morning. We've looked at this scene for so many nights and you can now just by the sound of it know how much closer it all is to Baghdad.
There's something about the stillness of the shot that belies the reality of what lies just behind it. Just after eight in the morning, Saturday morning in Baghdad.
We begin the hour with a quick read on the state of play. It comes from CNN's Jamie McIntyre and it starts off at what was Saddam International Airport.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Saddam International Airport has been renamed Baghdad International by U.S. troops who now hold the strategic real estate just 12 miles from the city center. Though still under fire from Iraqi forces, Pentagon officials say the airport will soon be a key fire base from which the U.S. can expand its attacks on the Iraqi capital.
MAJ. GEN. STAN MCCHRYSTAL, JOINT STAFF DEPUTY DIRECTOR: It's a great location on the southwest portion of Baghdad to allow us to posture ourselves around the city or to move into the city.
MCINTYRE: Nearby are three palace complexes, all considered regime command and control facilities and legitimate military targets. And, once the entire perimeter is secure and more troops and attack helicopters can be brought in, the U.S. can use the vast airport complex as a launching pad for commando style raids on centers of gravity for the regime. And, one objective that like the airport has both strategic and symbolic value is Iraqi television.
MCCHRYSTAL: Well, the regime determined early on that one of its primary mechanisms for controlling the population and exerting coercion was through its media.
MCINTYRE: Whether or not the most recent tapes showing Saddam Hussein addressing the Iraqi people and mingling with adoring crowds on the streets of Baghdad are real or fake, the effect is the same, sending a convincing message his regime is still in power. The U.S. has repeatedly targeted television transmitters and satellite dishes, but while the signal goes down from time to time it always comes back.
MCCHRYSTAL: It has a very redundant system starting with fixed sites to include mobile vans that it uses to put out its signal.
MCINTYRE: Still, bomb damage may have knocked out local broadcasts and limited Iraq to sending satellite signals abroad. With the power out in parts of Baghdad it's not clear how many Iraqis are watching but until the television transmissions are controlled by the U.S. led coalition the Iraqi people will not believe the claims of the United States.
(on camera): There may be another reason the U.S. is having trouble knocking Iraqi television off the air. Iraq may have moved some backup operations to a Baghdad hotel where foreign journalists are working effectively using them as human shields.
Jamie McIntyre CNN, the Pentagon.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: If you were with us last night, you know we saw a portion of the Baghdad for the Baghdad Airport play out in the early hours of the morning, Walt Rodgers giving us his view from the highway nearby.
Tonight we have better, clearer views of what was going on in some places and what was going on in some places was especially nasty.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm giving order to shoot that thing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shoot that thing. The javelin will not lock onto them. You can see it from here. Hey, you need to move up closer, all the way to the guardrail, go.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get in closer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, go to the guardrail, right over top of that pole next to that -- right to that guard tower that's where they are. Let's go, get them. Do you see them? Come on baby, he's right there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You already hit one of them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought they rolled with a missile. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, bring that one up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Leave the missile. Hey man, put it down. Bring it over here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Huh?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bring it over here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey this one's messed up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're moving down, green you move up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey come on let's go. You got a sign on it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, this one's (unintelligible).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're moving. They're moving. Do you see that split between those two trees. Look to the right of the guard tower. That's where they are.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You see them (unintelligible)?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I see them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Unintelligible) get down to the javelin.
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right let's engage. Shoot it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go baby.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah. (Unintelligible) Blue 1, that target just went about 200 meters in the air. There are three next to them. I don't know what the hell happened to it. We shot it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two with that shot.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: One moment in a long night in the battle to control the airport last night.
Jason Bellini is embedded with the Marines, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and Jason joins us from Nasiriya, I believe -- Jason.
JASON BELLINI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Aaron. I'm in Nasiriya. We've received clearance now to report on cooperation that's going on between U.S. Special Forces and what they're calling freedom fighters, armed Iraqis who they've recruited here in this area and they're now assisting them with the difficult effort of ferreting out those individuals that are still (unintelligible) in this town.
As you remember, Aaron, this area for the last couple of weeks has had numerous incidents. We had one just the other day and we've learned about these freedom fighters for the first time yesterday during one such incident. Our compound, the Marines that we're with their compound took fire. The Marines they fired back and in that incident they began firing at a white pickup truck and they believed that that's where the shots at them were coming from.
Well, it turned out that those people in that truck with the Kalishnikov rifles were freedom fighters working with U.S. Special Forces. They were told to cease their fire. They accidentally injured one of those freedom fighters in the shoulder who is now out of the fight, out of -- won't be able to assist in that effort. The colonel that I spoke with yesterday told me that there are between 150 and 200 such individuals that are working with Special Forces here in Nasiriya -- Aaron.
BROWN: Do they have any idea how many of the Iraqi irregulars are still in Nasiriya?
BELLINI: It's very difficult to tell. When we first got here they were saying that probably less than a thousand is what they believe a number of Fedayeen militiamen that are still in the city, but they really don't have a good estimate at this point on how many there are and it's so difficult when they're not in uniform and when these incidents are popping up very sporadically.
Yesterday, most of the afternoon was very quiet here, no incidents in our area. So, they go into hiding and then they pop up out of the woodwork as they like to say here.
BROWN: And, when it's quiet, what's happening? Are the Marines doing what?
BELLINI: Marines are going on patrol in the city itself. They've moving small convoys throughout the city on the streets. They're working on the bridges directing traffic, checking people before they cross from one side of the Euphrates River to the other, sometimes frisking people, looking inside their bags, seeing what they're carrying.
Also, they're searching for munitions as well, where they're being tipped off that there are more munitions to be found and they found an enormous number. That's another thing that we learned yesterday, Aaron, and we also got clearance to report from the senior officer that most of these munitions that they're finding are coming from Jordan.
We saw some boxes that were marked very clearly with the country Jordan on them. The date on the boxes was 2002. The commander I spoke with said that's very troubling that the Jordanians were providing these arms and as recently as 2002 if that's when these arms arrived here -- Aaron.
BROWN: And, everybody is safe in all of this, all of the American Marines safe in all of this?
BELLINI: So far. The last couple days no Marines have been -- no Marines have been killed in the last few days in incidents involving incoming fired upon from these militiamen. We had one incident the other day where a Marine accidentally stepped on a bomb lid, a cluster bomb lid that was unexploded and when he stepped upon it, it blew off two of his toes. That was just here at this compound where we're based at the moment -- Aaron.
BROWN: Jason, thank you, Jason Bellini. There's plenty of danger around still.
Walking through a school is an inspiring thing to do in peacetime but war changes even the simplest things. CNN's Ryan Chilcote went along with the 101st Airborne to search a place that's supposed to have desks and books and blackboards and children in it. This one had something else.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Outside of Najaf High School, Specialist Kim Carr (ph) works a crowd eager to help with one of the most effective weapons of all, fluency in Arabic.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are 50 missiles inside there.
CHILCOTE: Not much later the same guys who say they were forced to stash the weapons by Fedayeen militia leave no slack. Battalion's Bravo Company (unintelligible) school hall. Apparently believing American soldiers would never target a school or go looking around in one, the weapons are hodgepodge from the world's best makers to the homemade lie out in the open.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, yeah. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven hand grenades.
CHILCOTE: Another room reveals rocket-propelled grenades with the fuses ready to go. For the American Joe it's a picture perfect moment. Everyone wants in on the action.
A third room reveals mortars. It has all the smell of a successful hunt. Taking away Saddam's weapons has the engineers, whose job it is to blow it all up, salivating. These ID cards may prove to be the biggest find of all. The Fedayeen are rarely captured with their ID or weapon.
SGT. BRANDON NEAL, 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION: They seem to be not having it on them when they're caught or when they're questioned but they seem to have a cache some where. There's probably plenty other caches that we know about.
CHILCOTE: When the work was done the school was gun free, something those (unintelligible) soldiers hope to repeat one building at a time -- Ryan Chilcote, CNN with the 101st Airborne, Najaf, Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: To have a sense of the day-to-day these days, we're joined on the phone by Michael Gordon. Michael is the chief military affairs writer for "The New York Times." He is in Kuwait and Michael it's good to talk to you. How do you see the lead right now?
MICHAEL GORDON, "THE NEW YORK TIMES" (via telephone): Well, I think that the war is going pretty well from the American perspective. They certainly got up to Baghdad ahead of schedule and on the periphery, and I think there may be an image in the United States that they're on the verge of clinching this thing but just a few caveats.
What's really around Baghdad is essentially a toe hold, maybe it's a determined toe hold but you really have one Army division and something less than a Marine division at this time, perhaps 20,000, 25,000 folks on the southern periphery of the city, and this is a city of five million people, give or take 500,000 and which is defended still by a Special Republican Guard that's still active of about 15,000 to 20,000. So, I guess the lead is that while the war has gone very well from an American perspective up to now they're really coming to the most difficult phase of it.
BROWN: They're coming to a point where they need to consolidate or surround the city of Baghdad?
GORDON: Well, they certainly need to consolidate a little bit of their combat power and as you know a persistent, repetitive theme of mind is that they don't have all that much of it in terms of ground forces but they certainly need to add something to what they've got.
But then, my sense is that the concept is not to lay some indefinite siege to the city and try to outwait the regime. The goal is to destroy and collapse the regime and that means launching attacks inside the city involving ground forces and air strikes.
BROWN: Michael, from the people you're talking to, the generals and the colonels and majors that you're talking to, is that the kind of thing that can happen before there are more forces in the area? Are there enough people in the area now to at least start that process or must that wait?
GORDON: I think in principle it can happen pretty soon. I mean you're talking -- their goal is not to take over and occupy the entire city at this stage and fight door-to-door. Their goal is to basically seem to have -- be following concept lines to kind of do fairly quick raids in and out.
They'll pick a target, a leadership target or a key headquarters or something of that sort and there will be an armored column or maybe light infantry and they'll go in, attack it and get out. This all has to be based on some rather good intelligence. That's on concept but there is also some consideration being given, as I understand it, of actually going into the city and occupying indefinitely areas of it which would then become bases for future strikes within the city.
So, you know, I think that they want to keep the pressure on and I think they're moving into a phase of a war that's going to be very different because what we had up to now was, you know, rapid movement in the wide open desert where our tanks, cavalry and their tanks and it was fast and pretty free wheeling. And now what's the next phase of the war is almost the antithesis of that. What you have is you're going to have a rather methodical stage of the war fighting at close quarters in a congested environment, a city, where the long range weapons like tanks don't do you any good.
You're pretty much down to small arms and, yes, you can use air power but not as liberally as it was used against the Republican Guard divisions outside the city because you're going to be redirecting inside air strikes inside a populated center.
So, really the whole style of the war, I think, is just about to change from this fast moving, high intensity conflict to something that's methodical and much more discriminate in its kind of fire power.
BROWN: And just flip the coin over as briefly as you can. What are the risks now as they see them at the command?
GORDON: Well, I mean urban warfare is regarded as one of the most risky and difficult of missions and, you know, the forces here now have some experience with it because they've done it in Najaf, Nasiriya, Samallah (ph). They're in Karbala. I mean the British are in Basra. They've been doing this in the southern cities.
But Baghdad is a different place. It's really the hornet's nest in terms of Saddam Hussein's forces and there's still some life left in the regime and in its forces so I think that they're determined to do it in a smart way.
They don't want to do a Grozny or a Stalingrad or anything of that sort. They want to do a much more careful kind of penetration of the city and just go after key areas of it. But, there's only so much you can do to limit the risks and venturing into a city with an army is just an inherently risky enterprise.
BROWN: Just go back to something you said at the beginning. This has all happened a bit more quickly than they anticipated it would happen.
GORDON: Well, that's my impression. I mean I didn't draw up the plan but my sense is that these things go in phases and no plan ever works the way it's drawn up to work. You know it's a plan and so my sense is that the first part was a little slower than they thought because they were ambushed in the rear by these paramilitaries and they had to kind of redirect their attention to that problem.
But then once they contained that problem, the next phase was fighting a Republican Guard and the Republican Guard just collapsed under the weight of air power essentially and some of the long range fire power. And there have been some tremendous battles over the last few days, completely one-sided.
If you just go by the BDA, the battle damage assessment, that the military is turning in, I mean two days ago the 5th Corps reported engagement in which according to their statistics they killed somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqi soldiers and maybe had a handful of casualties on their own side.
Yesterday, they almost routinely they put the dead on the Iraqi side at 400 and a fair number of tanks and the Marines had similar figures, so there was some resistance and there was some fighting. It just was pretty much one-sided as these armored forces, you know combined armed forces took on the so-called technicals, these paramilitaries with trucks, SUVs, and also Iraqi armor that was just overmatched.
So, the paramilitary phase slowed them up but the Republican Guard basically really collapsed under the weight of the air and land attack and now that's brought them to the third and most difficult phase the urban warfare phase.
BROWN: Michael, thank you. We're about to put a piece of that, that urban warfare piece in play, a significant moment now in this two and a half week old war.
We go to CNN's Walter Rodgers to report it -- Walter.
WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Aaron. U.S. Army sources have now confirmed that 3rd Infantry Division's tanks are now operating within Baghdad itself, inside the city itself. We have known about this for a while but have not been allowed to report it until this moment.
But the 3rd Infantry Division now has tanks, several units of tanks inside the city of Baghdad. It's described as a reconnaissance mission. Again, we know what their objective is. I don't think we should report that at this point but they are inside the city of Baghdad and as we look at the maps it appears as if they are trying to carve up chunks of the city, one chunk of the city at a time, one zone at a time, again, so that a firm control can be established.
But there is no question now that elements of the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division are now operating with their tanks inside the city of Baghdad. We've seen the maps. We know exactly where they are. They punched up from the south. We can not disclose what their ultimate objective is -- Aaron.
BROWN: Walt, thank you.
General Clark weigh in here, the significance of the moment. It's obviously, the symbolic significance is easy, the rest of it a little more complicated.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK (RET.), FMR. NATO SUPREME CMDR.: Well, I think it's the old principal of gaining and maintaining contact with the enemy, Aaron, and there was a lot of talk about surrounding Baghdad and somebody said maybe we'd put it under siege in effect.
But actually what's happening is the troops are continuing to advance when they don't meet resistance. They're careful. They're cautious. They're maintaining security but they're continuing to advance and the thing that's really astonishing is how robust and well sustained these Army forces are. They're rolling forward day after day. They're in contact every day. They're in danger every night and they're continuing to roll forward.
And, I'd also point out that there's a lot of good air/ground coordination in this because the Army couldn't be doing this without the Air Force overhead and those close air support tactical air control parties on the ground with the lead troops. But this is the forward movement. This is the pressure. This is what's going to cause the Iraqi regime to crumble.
BROWN: General, thank you. We'll take a break and our coverage continues in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: We're always a bit conflicted when we talk about a journalist getting hurt or killed. We are there to tell the story. We are certainly not there to become the story and we go to dangerous places willingly.
That said we still want to tell the story of Michael Kelly, the fifth journalist killed in Iraq. Mike Kelly died in an accident last night while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry. His family lost a dad and a husband and the rest of us, all of us, lost one of the most compelling voices in American journalism today.
Here's CNN's Bruce Morton.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Michael Kelly was 46, editor-at-large for the "Atlantic Monthly," and a syndicated columnist for "The Washington Post." He's the first American reporter and the first embedded journalist to die in the war.
VICTORIA CLARKE, PENTAGON SPOKESWOMAN: I know that many people in this building and this town knew Mike Kelly who was killed last night just south of Baghdad. Mike was just a phenomenal journalist with an enthusiasm for his work that was surpassed only by his passion for his family.
MORTON: Kelly died "The Washington Post" reported in a Humvee accident. He had criticized restrictions on the press in the first Gulf War which he covered, but likes the embedding system.
MICHAEL KELLY, "THE WASHINGTON POST": This way you at least have a couple of very good things potentially. You have a real journalist with all the units. That's the first good thing. The second good thing is that there's no official censorship structure.
MORTON: Kelly was a conservative with a sense of humor, a sense of the preposterousness government sometimes displays. He got fired from "The New Republic," too anti-Clinton the publisher thought, went on to the "National Journal" and then "The Atlantic." His last "Washington Post" column published Thursday talked about a body near the bridge across the Euphrates.
"He had been an old man, poor, not a regular soldier judging from his clothes. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march rumbled past him pushing on."
And, Kelly talked about the danger he faced.
KELLY: (Unintelligible) for instance a lot more danger to be wandering around say Chechnya than doing this or wandering around Sierra Leone. I mean here there is some element of danger but you are surrounded by an Army literally who is going to try very hard to keep you out of danger.
MORTON: Kelly died covering a war he believed in, had written columns supporting. He leaves a wife and two sons, aged 6 and 3.
ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECY.: The president expresses his sorrow and his condolences to the Kelly family and the president, of course, expresses his sorrow and condolences to all of those military, civilian, and journalists who have died in this combat.
MORTON: Bruce Morton CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: The owner of "The Atlantic Monthly" said this today. The magazine has had 145 years of good times and bad but no moment more deeply sad than this one now.
We're joined in Washington by one of Mike Kelly's colleagues at "The Atlantic Monthly," James Fallows. It's good to see you on a terrible occasion. Mr. Kelly was one of the most interesting and passionate conservative voices in the country.
JAMES FALLOWS, "THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY": It's certainly true that he's been known best by the general public in the last few years for his newspaper columns which have been fearlessly conservative.
But I think to people in the business, his impact was really in two other things. One was his passion as a reporter which first got national renown 12 years ago during the first Gulf War when he gave remarkable magazine reporting and his book "Martyr's Day."
And the other thing which has been really, and that's what brought him back this time, it was no surprise to any of us that he would want to be as close to the action as he could. The other thing was his joy and passion and leadership as an editor.
You know "The Atlantic" has been under his guidance for the last couple of years and people, I think most people at "The Atlantic" probably did not share, do not share his overall political opinions but there is tremendous loyalty and devotion and gratitude towards him just the spirit that he brought to making journalism as good and as engaging and as timely as it could be.
BROWN: And for all those people watching this who know what reporters do and probably know what publishers do and don't have a clue really what editors do, why does that matter? FALLOWS: It matters because, you know, people think perhaps of an editor is the guy with the pencil who's going through and changing verbs, and that is an important part of high-end journalism.
But, it's even more, I mean, maybe it is in a terrible way appropriate that Mike ended up in a military action because there was a kind of military bravado, in the best sense, to the way he wanted to lead journalistic enterprises, where I remember on about 15 minutes after I heard the first news on September 11, the first communication I had with anybody outside my household was with Mike Kelly, who was calling to say, what can we do? How can we, a monthly magazine with a long lead time, how can we get all over this story that's about to unfold in historic ways and, in some fashion, that people would notice?
So, I think the role of an editor that actually matters most is inspiring people to do the best, you know, bravest job that they can do, and that is what Mike really excelled at.
BROWN: Sometimes when you read Mike's column, he always seemed to me that he saw his world very clearly, very black and white. In fact, did he see gray in a world? Did he see nuance in his world?
FALLOWS: He did, and I think Mike would take no offense since we've had this conversation before in my saying there were various aspects of him, and his column writing persona was a different part of him than you saw in his magazine life, or he was very, very careful and scrupulous about not letting his own decided political opinions, you know, shape the magazine.
And also in his personal life, where he would come across in his columns as somewhat take-no-prisoners guy who you would not want to cross, whereas everybody who knew him was impressed by his warmth, by his humor, by his sense of the absurd, by his decency to people, by his love for his wife and his two small sons and for his family.
And I am sure, among the things he would say if he were here now, would be the concern for the other person who died with him, that was the soldier who was also in that Humvee and that soldier's family.
BROWN: Whatever tiny comfort it brings, our condolences to you and everyone at the magazine. I think our country an important and really interesting voice today, and that is sad. Thanks a lot.
FALLOWS: Thank you.
BROWN: James Fallows of "The Atlantic Monthly". We'll take break. We will update the day's headlines, and we'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(NEWSBREAK)
BROWN: Fredricka, thank you, and have a good rest of the night. I think you got the rest of the night. Thank you very much. It's good to see you back... WHITFIELD: I'll be around a couple of more hours actually.
BROWN: Well, good. Good to have you. She was off in Turkey and back home.
Do we have pictures of the Constellation? OK. All this talk about tanks rolling in to Baghdad and the rest, we ought not lose sight of the fact that there is still an air operation going on. These are live pictures off of video phone coming in from the USS Constellation. We were watching them come in over the last few minutes or so.
There is just a -- almost a constant -- not literally constant, comings and goings of these flights. Now their mission is somewhat different than it was, course, in the early stages. But it's still matters. There's still work to be done. There's work to be done in the north, and there is still risk to be had. Any time a jet takes off one of these aircraft carriers, there is risk in the air, and there is risk in the mission.
And we learn that over the last couple of days. An F-18 was lost just two nights ago, as I recall. One pilot lost in that. So, we -- as we have over the last couple days focused so much on the ground operation as it's closed in to Baghdad, we ought not lose sight of the fact that there are sailors and Navy pilots on board these aircraft carriers, who are also continuing to make their contribution to the American effort in Iraq.
These -- it's almost impossible to describe what it is like, if you haven't done it -- and I have done it once -- to either take off or land on an aircraft carrier. When those things come back, it looks like a mattress in the middle of the ocean for that jet to put down on. And now it appears ready to take off from.
General Clark?
CLARK: That's still remarkable technology and, really, there's no other nation that has that technology and the skill and the team work to put that operation together, Aaron.
BROWN: You have a small city, a city not -- honestly not a whole lot larger than -- or smaller, rather -- than the one I grew up in. Six thousand people or so on those aircraft carriers. It's complicated piece of business.
Baghdad on a Saturday morning. We see the gray and the haze and the sky. And we see people moving around there. And what must all of them be thinking about the day ahead? Surely now they know that at least the very beginning of the American effort inside the city itself is under way. How widely that is known in the city we don't know. But we do know it is known by us.
CNN's Walt Rodgers joins us again. Walt, we want neither to overstate this or understate its significance that elements of the Third Infantry have moved in. Is that right? RODGERS: That is indeed true, Aaron. And it must have been quite a shock for the Baghdad residents when they woke up this Saturday morning to see American tanks rolling through their city.
Here's what we know. Elements of the Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Division have moved in to the south central part of Baghdad itself. This is no longer the outskirts. U. S. tanks from the Third Infantry Division are rolling in Baghdad at this time.
Army sources have confirmed this to CNN. They've told us we can report it. They have also said we should describe this as essentially a reconnaissance foray.
Still, we know their objective. We cannot report the objective at this time. It does appear very clearly, from the maps we've seen, that what the Army is striving to do at this point is carve out chunks of the city, bite off a chunk of Baghdad and then take that chunk and literally dismember the city zone by zone so that each of these zones falls under the control of the U. S. Army.
Again, this is a very significant step forward because, as I say, when the Iraqis of Baghdad woke up this morning in some neighborhoods in the center of the city, they woke up to main U. S. battle tanks rolling through -- Aaron.
Walt, thank you.
General Clark, very quickly, how do the Iraqis defend that, General?
CLARK: They've got to mass forces against the tanks. They've got to get RPG guides. They've got to throw rocket -- they've got to throw Molotov cocktails, gasoline bottles on them. They've got to do something, because this is the kind of thrust that, if it goes in and carves up hunks of the city, it's over.
BROWN: And just really quickly, once established, is there any way to stop it? Once they're sort of positioned there, is the any way to stop it?
CLARK: Yes because one of the major risks -- as you were talking to Michael Gordon before -- one of the major risks is we simply don't have the numbers of troops that the Iraqis presumably could field, counting the special Republican Guards, remnants of other divisions, Fedayeen, civilians given rifles, and so forth.
So, there's always a chance that somehow, they could penetrate behind our positions and roll us up. So, we have to be very alert when we're in here.
BROWN: General, thank you. We'll keep an eye on that as that's going on, its significance. There may be a point where we can report all of the detail that Mike has -- or, rather, that Walter has.
There is one element of we haven't touched on in a while, and that's the question of humanitarian aid and refugees and the like. We'll talk with Ken Bacon in a moment. We take a break first.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: You may recognize our next guest as the face at the Pentagon, and although I haven't seen him, perhaps even the bow tie at the Pentagon during the Clinton years.
Now he's the face of something else entirely. Ken Bacon is the president of the aid group, Refugees International. He joins us from New York to talk about the humanitarian situation in different parts of the country and, Ken, it is very nice to see you again. And I got the bow tie part right.
KEN BACON, PRESIDENT, REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL: Good to be here.
BROWN: Thank you. We haven't seen pictures of masses of refugees over the last two weeks. Is the situation less bad than you thought it might be?
BACON: The situation has been less bad than many of us predicted. Although, to be fair, the predictions of massive displacement, as much as 20 percent of the population of Iraq, were based on a war that lasted at least two to three months. So, in a short war, we haven't seen much displacement.
We may be beginning to see the start of more massive flows out of Baghdad now. There were reports today of groups of 10,000 to 30,000 people leaving Baghdad, going north into the countryside to get away from the fighting.
BROWN: Now, their options are to go where? If they just want to go north, they go to northern Iraq. But if they leave the country, they try to get into Turkey. Where else?
BACON: Probably most will go from Baghdad, either to Iran or to Jordan. One problem is that three of Iraq's neighbors have said they won't accept any refugees. That is Turkey, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The three other countries, Jordan, Iran, and Syria, said that they will accept refugees.
So far, the flow has been slow but, as I say, it could be picking up, and I would expect to see big groups moving toward Iran.
BROWN: And that leads to what? We already see in the south already we've got a humanitarian crisis for some proportion because there's a lack of something as simple and essential as drinking water.
BACON: Yes. Displacement is a problem because it can lead to starvation. It can lead to exposure. It can lead to exhaustion and to disease. So, it's very important to try to get food and water and care to these people soon as possible.
The U.N. is well positioned to do that. It's lined up food, tents, et cetera. But all -- most of this is outside Iraq. The problem is going to be if these people can't get out of Iraq, if they're caught in Iraq, it will be difficult to get aid to them as long as the fighting's going on. BROWN: What we call NGOs, nongovernmental organizations -- how prepared are the NGOs to actually get the food, get the water, get the doctors, get the medicine if, in fact they can get to the refugees?
BACON: They're more and more prepared. They got a late start because they didn't get U. S. Government funding until this week actually. But the U.N. has filled a lot of that gap by, as I say, prepositioning tents, food, and other equipment that is necessary to take care of refugees.
BROWN: Do you think we're heading for a manageable -- any time there are hundreds or thousands of refugees, it's a horrible thing. These are individual lives. But do you think we are heading for a manageable problem?
BACON: It looks that way now, but it's really hard to predict because so much depends on the length and the intensity of the war. If we get in to block by block fighting within Baghdad, if the electricity stays off for a long period of time, interfering with water pumps and sanitation systems, then I think you're going to see people leaving at a much faster rate. And there could be a period where we are overwhelmed, particularly as they're making their way to the borders, and it's difficult to get them food and other support.
Once they get to the borders of Iran and Syria and Jordan, the U.N. and NGOs are well prepared to take care of them -- within limits. But so far the flows have been quite limited.
BROWN: Ken, thank you. Ken Bacon is president now of Refugees International. To the extent that there's ever good news on a subject like this, the news here at least is not as bad as it might have otherwise been, and we appreciate hearing it. Thank you very much. Good to see him. Very recognizable face to many of you.
We saw an image earlier this week of a child getting an education he never wanted or deserved. An education in war. We'll tell you more about that after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: As we got on the subject of humanitarian aid, let's bring General Clark in. I suppose this, General, isn't a classic military problem, but it is a classic problem to winning the peace.
CLARK: It is, and it's a problem that militaries often get blamed for, Aaron, because refugees are moving as a consequence of operations. And in this case, I think, what we're seeing, really, is probably the start of a refugee flow. And it could be significant.
One of the things, though, that comes out from the early indications is that I'm surprised that these refugees are leaving this early at this stage in the battle. It indicates to me that Saddam's local Ba'ath party units don't have the kind of grip on the population that you would have expected because Saddam's success depends, in part, in defending Baghdad on keeping lots of civilians in there and holding them hostage and making them suffer as a result of the American attack.
BROWN: You have a city roughly, give or take, 5 million people. If 500,000 leave, you've got a problem. But there's still 4.5 million people there to cause the American military a problem
CLARK: That's exactly right. But you would think that if this state is organized the way we anticipate it to be, with very tight control by the Ba'ath party with precincts and block by block watching and control the population, that they'd have a hard time getting out, that automobile travel would be restricted, and other things. And apparently that's not the case.
BROWN: Let me just see if this makes sense. I'm just working through this.
For the Americans, it strikes me, there's a two-edge sword here because on the one hand, what the Americans don't want is lot of people in the streets. They want the -- literally -- they want the streets clear. They would -- they don't want a refugee problem. They don't want people flowing out of the city. They just want people to stay where they are, right?
CLARK: Well, yes and no. If there's fighting, and there's firing coming from a building, it would be wonderful for the Americans if they knew that there were nobody in the building, no civilians at all, just fighters. And then you could treat it as a military target.
So, in one respect, we don't want a refugee problem, and we certainly don't want them interfering with the maneuver of our forces and the entry of our forces into the Baghdad region. But on the other hand, in terms of each tactical engagement, if there's something we can do to get the civilian population out of that area so we could concentrate on the fighters, that would be helpful to us.
BROWN: In an individual operation?
CLARK: Yes. Exactly.
BROWN: General Clark, thank you.
Scott Nelson of "The Boston Globe" is on the phone. Scott we talked to a couple of times before along the way, and we'll talk with him now.
Scott, tell us where you are, as best you're allowed, and what you can report.
SCOTT NELSON, BOSTON GLOBE CORRESPONDENT: We're just outside the city of Baghdad right now at the southeast. It's been a long haul the last couple of days for the Marines, eventually fighting their way up, city by city, along the Tigris River coming up. But they're largely there now. I think there's still some pockets of fighting. There's still some pockets, Republican Guard holding out.
And there was relatively intense shelling overnight from artillery positions. But it feels here like it's largely over. The Marines have largely fought the fight that they came here to do, and they're now at the edge of the capital city.
BROWN: Are they aware -- are you aware that some tanks, some number of tanks of the Third Infantry Division, have now entered the city of Baghdad?
NELSON: They're not aware of that. I'll tell you what. When I hang up here and tell them, I'm sure they'll be glad to hear it.
A lot of the fighting here yesterday, as we came up through the towns through the southeast of Baghdad, was, in fact, Marine M-1 tanks against Republican Guard tanks, and I saw lot of blown up Iraqi tanks along the way.
And this morning I actually passed my first Marine tank that had been hit by a tow missile and blown up. So, there have been a lot of tanks fighting here, but the Marines will be glad to hear that the Third ID tanks are actually in Baghdad at this point.
BROWN: We've talked in each of our conversations about the changing mood of the troops that you're traveling with. They've now had -- the last several days very intense for them, not at all easy. They have emerged from that successfully. How has the mood changed over the last several days?
NELSON: I think that there's almost a little bit of pent up emotion here that it feels like we're almost done, but we can't quite let up. I think that's what the Marines are -- you know, the Marines seem to be feeling because there are still pockets of Republican Guard out here, and there are still people who are willing to fight and die against the Marines. And they know that, and they can't completely let down their guard at this point.
It's not as if the fight is over, but it's largely over. I think the large-pitched battles are probably done, and most of the towns have been swept at this point, and I think that there's just a little bit of expectation here. Look, we're almost done, we're almost to the place we set out to find. We just have to finish the job and not take any silly casualties at the end here. Now, let's all get home, I think, is what they're thinking.
BROWN: Let's all get home, indeed. Scott, thanks again. Scott Nelson, who reports for "The Boston Globe" and has been reporting for us as well.
We've assembled a group of people from around the country again tonight to talk a bit about where the country is at this moment. They'll join us after a break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: This time of night, we try and do it around this time every night to get a sense of where the country is, how the country's mood is changing, or staying the same in some respect. We've gathered a couple folks with us tonight. Go ahead, keep rolling here.
Andrei Cherny is a community activist in Los Angeles, California, as I remember it. And Janet Parshall -- I hope, Janet, I have pronounced that right -- is a radio talk show host, and she joins us from the Midwest tonight in Chicago, are you?
JANET PARSHALL, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Boston, actually.
BROWN: In Boston. I'm sorry. Thanks a lot. I know you were traveling today. Let me start with you, Janet. You do -- in the calls that you've been getting in the last two weeks, has there been a change in tone, a change in subject? How have things changed?
PARSHALL: Well, doing three hours a day, which means 15 hours of radio a week, we've had a real good sense of being able to listen to what the culture is saying. And, predominately, Aaron, what we're getting is, probably every day, a greater sense of pride in our armed forces, a greater sense of being reminded again how you define the word hero, and a greater sense not taking freedom for granted.
I'm taking a look at the Iraqi situation of understanding these people are hungry for freedom. The President said it beautifully in his State of the Union address, and it's something that we're seeing lived out, that freedom is not America's gift to the world; it's God's gift to humanity. So, I think for a lot of Americans, they are re- embracing that concept that freedom is an awful special gift we have.
BROWN: I'm always reluctant to label anyone or anything. How would you characterize your program and your audience?
PARSHALL: As a talk show host, we cover a myriad of subjects. We are stationed in the nation's capital. I talk to about 3.5 million people every day, and it's a mix. It would be very easy to say that lot of my listeners are conservative, but based on the some of the mail I get, I don't think that's absolutely a complete representation of the whole audience.
BROWN: Got it.
Andrei, let me turn to you in Los Angeles. You're a pretty political guy. Tell me, sort of -- we got into a conversation last night about how watching all of this sort of petty, political disputes don't seem especially as important as they once did. Do you agree with that?
ANDREI CHERNY, COMMUNITY ACTIVIST: I think that's certainly true. I think you're seeing my generation, really, being confronted with this type of war and this type of conflict for the first time. We had certainly -- what happened in Kosovo or Panama -- you had the 100 hours of the first Gulf War.
But, really, this is the first time we've seen this sort of large scale war with American casualties on a daily basis, and no matter where you are in a political spectrum, I think, for my generation, it has really caused a re-evaluation of some of the things that we hold true and some of the ways that we look at the world, no matter where we come from.
BROWN: Good and bad? CHERNY: Good and bad. Certainly. I think that there is the same sort of spectrum of beliefs in my generation that you see anywhere else.
You know, I'm sitting here in Los Angeles, and certainly there are lot of people in my generation who are out there protesting, out there tying up traffic and lying down in the middle of the streets. And yet, you see young people the very same age from Los Angeles fighting in Iraq, and in a couple cases, so far unfortunately, dying in Iraq. And so you certainly see that same sort of breakdown that you see in the population at large.
But I think it really is becoming a formative, political experience for my generation really in the same way that maybe Munich was for the greatest generation or Vietnam was for my parents' generation. This war, and combined with what happened September 11, is really causing us to really have some basic decisions that we have to make about how we see the world and how we see America's role in the world.
BROWN: Just one more quick one because I want to get back to Janet. Do you think the two sides that you describe, the kids who are protesting and the kids who are fighting, do you think the kids who are protesting connect, in any way, with the young men and women who are fighting?
CHERNY: I think they do. And that's one of the thins that I have been struck by, is that as opposed to maybe previous generations, even the most virulent anti-war protesters will still say, in my experience, that they support the troops. I don't think you're going to see those people spitting on the troops in the same way that you had in the Vietnam generation.
And so, I think there is this fundamental patriotism and a fundamental feeling of connection with the people who are fighting even among the most anti-war protesters. I think they see that we, as a generation -- I think one of the things we are able to do is -- we see things in shades of gray much more than black and white.
BROWN: Let me get Janet back for the last word. Janet, it has seemed to me we have, over the last dozen years or so, live through a pretty cynical time. Do you think that, in any sense, we will come to this as a more idealistic group?
PARSHALL: I think that's a great question, Aaron. And, yes, I think the answer to that is absolutely. I think we get rather cavalier with concepts like duty and honor and sacrifice.
And it's times like this -- and Andrei made a very good point. It's times like this when I think we as an individual and we as a country have to do some personal inventory. What do we believe? Why do we believe it? How are we going to live?
I will tell you, also -- you asked about some of the coverage and some of the sentiment over the last couple weeks from my radio audience. There is a sense that there is a disproportionate amount of media coverage on the protesters, and it is out of balance with the multiple millions of people that have been very forthright in their support.
For example, defendamerica.mil is a Web site that the Department of Defense has put out, and over 10-million people have accessed that to send a letter of support to the troops.
And somehow my audience is sensing that those kinds of stories aren't the ones that are being told, that there's too much of a story of those protesters, and they seem to be very much in the minority that's out.
BROWN: Well, I hear that, too. And, as we often say, news is not the cat that doesn't get -- doesn't climb the tree. It's the one that does. But I -- it's a fair point to make.
Thank you, both. Nice job tonight.
PARSHALL: Thanks, Aaron.
BROWN: Thank you. Join us again.
We'll take a break. We'll update the day's headlines. Our coverage continues in a moment.
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(NEWSBREAK)
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Fredricka, thank you very much. See you in half an hour, appreciate that.
Baghdad on a Saturday morning and you can see the smoke over the city, some clouds over the city as well. Twelve miles away, the Americans control the airport on this Saturday morning.
You can hear some detonations, some explosions of some sort. I think you can still hear them rumbling through the Saturday morning. We've looked at this scene for so many nights and you can now just by the sound of it know how much closer it all is to Baghdad.
There's something about the stillness of the shot that belies the reality of what lies just behind it. Just after eight in the morning, Saturday morning in Baghdad.
We begin the hour with a quick read on the state of play. It comes from CNN's Jamie McIntyre and it starts off at what was Saddam International Airport.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Saddam International Airport has been renamed Baghdad International by U.S. troops who now hold the strategic real estate just 12 miles from the city center. Though still under fire from Iraqi forces, Pentagon officials say the airport will soon be a key fire base from which the U.S. can expand its attacks on the Iraqi capital.
MAJ. GEN. STAN MCCHRYSTAL, JOINT STAFF DEPUTY DIRECTOR: It's a great location on the southwest portion of Baghdad to allow us to posture ourselves around the city or to move into the city.
MCINTYRE: Nearby are three palace complexes, all considered regime command and control facilities and legitimate military targets. And, once the entire perimeter is secure and more troops and attack helicopters can be brought in, the U.S. can use the vast airport complex as a launching pad for commando style raids on centers of gravity for the regime. And, one objective that like the airport has both strategic and symbolic value is Iraqi television.
MCCHRYSTAL: Well, the regime determined early on that one of its primary mechanisms for controlling the population and exerting coercion was through its media.
MCINTYRE: Whether or not the most recent tapes showing Saddam Hussein addressing the Iraqi people and mingling with adoring crowds on the streets of Baghdad are real or fake, the effect is the same, sending a convincing message his regime is still in power. The U.S. has repeatedly targeted television transmitters and satellite dishes, but while the signal goes down from time to time it always comes back.
MCCHRYSTAL: It has a very redundant system starting with fixed sites to include mobile vans that it uses to put out its signal.
MCINTYRE: Still, bomb damage may have knocked out local broadcasts and limited Iraq to sending satellite signals abroad. With the power out in parts of Baghdad it's not clear how many Iraqis are watching but until the television transmissions are controlled by the U.S. led coalition the Iraqi people will not believe the claims of the United States.
(on camera): There may be another reason the U.S. is having trouble knocking Iraqi television off the air. Iraq may have moved some backup operations to a Baghdad hotel where foreign journalists are working effectively using them as human shields.
Jamie McIntyre CNN, the Pentagon.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: If you were with us last night, you know we saw a portion of the Baghdad for the Baghdad Airport play out in the early hours of the morning, Walt Rodgers giving us his view from the highway nearby.
Tonight we have better, clearer views of what was going on in some places and what was going on in some places was especially nasty.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm giving order to shoot that thing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shoot that thing. The javelin will not lock onto them. You can see it from here. Hey, you need to move up closer, all the way to the guardrail, go.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get in closer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, go to the guardrail, right over top of that pole next to that -- right to that guard tower that's where they are. Let's go, get them. Do you see them? Come on baby, he's right there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You already hit one of them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought they rolled with a missile. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, bring that one up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Leave the missile. Hey man, put it down. Bring it over here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Huh?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bring it over here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey this one's messed up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're moving down, green you move up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey come on let's go. You got a sign on it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, this one's (unintelligible).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're moving. They're moving. Do you see that split between those two trees. Look to the right of the guard tower. That's where they are.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You see them (unintelligible)?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I see them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Unintelligible) get down to the javelin.
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right let's engage. Shoot it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go baby.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah. (Unintelligible) Blue 1, that target just went about 200 meters in the air. There are three next to them. I don't know what the hell happened to it. We shot it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two with that shot.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: One moment in a long night in the battle to control the airport last night.
Jason Bellini is embedded with the Marines, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and Jason joins us from Nasiriya, I believe -- Jason.
JASON BELLINI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Aaron. I'm in Nasiriya. We've received clearance now to report on cooperation that's going on between U.S. Special Forces and what they're calling freedom fighters, armed Iraqis who they've recruited here in this area and they're now assisting them with the difficult effort of ferreting out those individuals that are still (unintelligible) in this town.
As you remember, Aaron, this area for the last couple of weeks has had numerous incidents. We had one just the other day and we've learned about these freedom fighters for the first time yesterday during one such incident. Our compound, the Marines that we're with their compound took fire. The Marines they fired back and in that incident they began firing at a white pickup truck and they believed that that's where the shots at them were coming from.
Well, it turned out that those people in that truck with the Kalishnikov rifles were freedom fighters working with U.S. Special Forces. They were told to cease their fire. They accidentally injured one of those freedom fighters in the shoulder who is now out of the fight, out of -- won't be able to assist in that effort. The colonel that I spoke with yesterday told me that there are between 150 and 200 such individuals that are working with Special Forces here in Nasiriya -- Aaron.
BROWN: Do they have any idea how many of the Iraqi irregulars are still in Nasiriya?
BELLINI: It's very difficult to tell. When we first got here they were saying that probably less than a thousand is what they believe a number of Fedayeen militiamen that are still in the city, but they really don't have a good estimate at this point on how many there are and it's so difficult when they're not in uniform and when these incidents are popping up very sporadically.
Yesterday, most of the afternoon was very quiet here, no incidents in our area. So, they go into hiding and then they pop up out of the woodwork as they like to say here.
BROWN: And, when it's quiet, what's happening? Are the Marines doing what?
BELLINI: Marines are going on patrol in the city itself. They've moving small convoys throughout the city on the streets. They're working on the bridges directing traffic, checking people before they cross from one side of the Euphrates River to the other, sometimes frisking people, looking inside their bags, seeing what they're carrying.
Also, they're searching for munitions as well, where they're being tipped off that there are more munitions to be found and they found an enormous number. That's another thing that we learned yesterday, Aaron, and we also got clearance to report from the senior officer that most of these munitions that they're finding are coming from Jordan.
We saw some boxes that were marked very clearly with the country Jordan on them. The date on the boxes was 2002. The commander I spoke with said that's very troubling that the Jordanians were providing these arms and as recently as 2002 if that's when these arms arrived here -- Aaron.
BROWN: And, everybody is safe in all of this, all of the American Marines safe in all of this?
BELLINI: So far. The last couple days no Marines have been -- no Marines have been killed in the last few days in incidents involving incoming fired upon from these militiamen. We had one incident the other day where a Marine accidentally stepped on a bomb lid, a cluster bomb lid that was unexploded and when he stepped upon it, it blew off two of his toes. That was just here at this compound where we're based at the moment -- Aaron.
BROWN: Jason, thank you, Jason Bellini. There's plenty of danger around still.
Walking through a school is an inspiring thing to do in peacetime but war changes even the simplest things. CNN's Ryan Chilcote went along with the 101st Airborne to search a place that's supposed to have desks and books and blackboards and children in it. This one had something else.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Outside of Najaf High School, Specialist Kim Carr (ph) works a crowd eager to help with one of the most effective weapons of all, fluency in Arabic.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are 50 missiles inside there.
CHILCOTE: Not much later the same guys who say they were forced to stash the weapons by Fedayeen militia leave no slack. Battalion's Bravo Company (unintelligible) school hall. Apparently believing American soldiers would never target a school or go looking around in one, the weapons are hodgepodge from the world's best makers to the homemade lie out in the open.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, yeah. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven hand grenades.
CHILCOTE: Another room reveals rocket-propelled grenades with the fuses ready to go. For the American Joe it's a picture perfect moment. Everyone wants in on the action.
A third room reveals mortars. It has all the smell of a successful hunt. Taking away Saddam's weapons has the engineers, whose job it is to blow it all up, salivating. These ID cards may prove to be the biggest find of all. The Fedayeen are rarely captured with their ID or weapon.
SGT. BRANDON NEAL, 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION: They seem to be not having it on them when they're caught or when they're questioned but they seem to have a cache some where. There's probably plenty other caches that we know about.
CHILCOTE: When the work was done the school was gun free, something those (unintelligible) soldiers hope to repeat one building at a time -- Ryan Chilcote, CNN with the 101st Airborne, Najaf, Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: To have a sense of the day-to-day these days, we're joined on the phone by Michael Gordon. Michael is the chief military affairs writer for "The New York Times." He is in Kuwait and Michael it's good to talk to you. How do you see the lead right now?
MICHAEL GORDON, "THE NEW YORK TIMES" (via telephone): Well, I think that the war is going pretty well from the American perspective. They certainly got up to Baghdad ahead of schedule and on the periphery, and I think there may be an image in the United States that they're on the verge of clinching this thing but just a few caveats.
What's really around Baghdad is essentially a toe hold, maybe it's a determined toe hold but you really have one Army division and something less than a Marine division at this time, perhaps 20,000, 25,000 folks on the southern periphery of the city, and this is a city of five million people, give or take 500,000 and which is defended still by a Special Republican Guard that's still active of about 15,000 to 20,000. So, I guess the lead is that while the war has gone very well from an American perspective up to now they're really coming to the most difficult phase of it.
BROWN: They're coming to a point where they need to consolidate or surround the city of Baghdad?
GORDON: Well, they certainly need to consolidate a little bit of their combat power and as you know a persistent, repetitive theme of mind is that they don't have all that much of it in terms of ground forces but they certainly need to add something to what they've got.
But then, my sense is that the concept is not to lay some indefinite siege to the city and try to outwait the regime. The goal is to destroy and collapse the regime and that means launching attacks inside the city involving ground forces and air strikes.
BROWN: Michael, from the people you're talking to, the generals and the colonels and majors that you're talking to, is that the kind of thing that can happen before there are more forces in the area? Are there enough people in the area now to at least start that process or must that wait?
GORDON: I think in principle it can happen pretty soon. I mean you're talking -- their goal is not to take over and occupy the entire city at this stage and fight door-to-door. Their goal is to basically seem to have -- be following concept lines to kind of do fairly quick raids in and out.
They'll pick a target, a leadership target or a key headquarters or something of that sort and there will be an armored column or maybe light infantry and they'll go in, attack it and get out. This all has to be based on some rather good intelligence. That's on concept but there is also some consideration being given, as I understand it, of actually going into the city and occupying indefinitely areas of it which would then become bases for future strikes within the city.
So, you know, I think that they want to keep the pressure on and I think they're moving into a phase of a war that's going to be very different because what we had up to now was, you know, rapid movement in the wide open desert where our tanks, cavalry and their tanks and it was fast and pretty free wheeling. And now what's the next phase of the war is almost the antithesis of that. What you have is you're going to have a rather methodical stage of the war fighting at close quarters in a congested environment, a city, where the long range weapons like tanks don't do you any good.
You're pretty much down to small arms and, yes, you can use air power but not as liberally as it was used against the Republican Guard divisions outside the city because you're going to be redirecting inside air strikes inside a populated center.
So, really the whole style of the war, I think, is just about to change from this fast moving, high intensity conflict to something that's methodical and much more discriminate in its kind of fire power.
BROWN: And just flip the coin over as briefly as you can. What are the risks now as they see them at the command?
GORDON: Well, I mean urban warfare is regarded as one of the most risky and difficult of missions and, you know, the forces here now have some experience with it because they've done it in Najaf, Nasiriya, Samallah (ph). They're in Karbala. I mean the British are in Basra. They've been doing this in the southern cities.
But Baghdad is a different place. It's really the hornet's nest in terms of Saddam Hussein's forces and there's still some life left in the regime and in its forces so I think that they're determined to do it in a smart way.
They don't want to do a Grozny or a Stalingrad or anything of that sort. They want to do a much more careful kind of penetration of the city and just go after key areas of it. But, there's only so much you can do to limit the risks and venturing into a city with an army is just an inherently risky enterprise.
BROWN: Just go back to something you said at the beginning. This has all happened a bit more quickly than they anticipated it would happen.
GORDON: Well, that's my impression. I mean I didn't draw up the plan but my sense is that these things go in phases and no plan ever works the way it's drawn up to work. You know it's a plan and so my sense is that the first part was a little slower than they thought because they were ambushed in the rear by these paramilitaries and they had to kind of redirect their attention to that problem.
But then once they contained that problem, the next phase was fighting a Republican Guard and the Republican Guard just collapsed under the weight of air power essentially and some of the long range fire power. And there have been some tremendous battles over the last few days, completely one-sided.
If you just go by the BDA, the battle damage assessment, that the military is turning in, I mean two days ago the 5th Corps reported engagement in which according to their statistics they killed somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqi soldiers and maybe had a handful of casualties on their own side.
Yesterday, they almost routinely they put the dead on the Iraqi side at 400 and a fair number of tanks and the Marines had similar figures, so there was some resistance and there was some fighting. It just was pretty much one-sided as these armored forces, you know combined armed forces took on the so-called technicals, these paramilitaries with trucks, SUVs, and also Iraqi armor that was just overmatched.
So, the paramilitary phase slowed them up but the Republican Guard basically really collapsed under the weight of the air and land attack and now that's brought them to the third and most difficult phase the urban warfare phase.
BROWN: Michael, thank you. We're about to put a piece of that, that urban warfare piece in play, a significant moment now in this two and a half week old war.
We go to CNN's Walter Rodgers to report it -- Walter.
WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Aaron. U.S. Army sources have now confirmed that 3rd Infantry Division's tanks are now operating within Baghdad itself, inside the city itself. We have known about this for a while but have not been allowed to report it until this moment.
But the 3rd Infantry Division now has tanks, several units of tanks inside the city of Baghdad. It's described as a reconnaissance mission. Again, we know what their objective is. I don't think we should report that at this point but they are inside the city of Baghdad and as we look at the maps it appears as if they are trying to carve up chunks of the city, one chunk of the city at a time, one zone at a time, again, so that a firm control can be established.
But there is no question now that elements of the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division are now operating with their tanks inside the city of Baghdad. We've seen the maps. We know exactly where they are. They punched up from the south. We can not disclose what their ultimate objective is -- Aaron.
BROWN: Walt, thank you.
General Clark weigh in here, the significance of the moment. It's obviously, the symbolic significance is easy, the rest of it a little more complicated.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK (RET.), FMR. NATO SUPREME CMDR.: Well, I think it's the old principal of gaining and maintaining contact with the enemy, Aaron, and there was a lot of talk about surrounding Baghdad and somebody said maybe we'd put it under siege in effect.
But actually what's happening is the troops are continuing to advance when they don't meet resistance. They're careful. They're cautious. They're maintaining security but they're continuing to advance and the thing that's really astonishing is how robust and well sustained these Army forces are. They're rolling forward day after day. They're in contact every day. They're in danger every night and they're continuing to roll forward.
And, I'd also point out that there's a lot of good air/ground coordination in this because the Army couldn't be doing this without the Air Force overhead and those close air support tactical air control parties on the ground with the lead troops. But this is the forward movement. This is the pressure. This is what's going to cause the Iraqi regime to crumble.
BROWN: General, thank you. We'll take a break and our coverage continues in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: We're always a bit conflicted when we talk about a journalist getting hurt or killed. We are there to tell the story. We are certainly not there to become the story and we go to dangerous places willingly.
That said we still want to tell the story of Michael Kelly, the fifth journalist killed in Iraq. Mike Kelly died in an accident last night while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry. His family lost a dad and a husband and the rest of us, all of us, lost one of the most compelling voices in American journalism today.
Here's CNN's Bruce Morton.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Michael Kelly was 46, editor-at-large for the "Atlantic Monthly," and a syndicated columnist for "The Washington Post." He's the first American reporter and the first embedded journalist to die in the war.
VICTORIA CLARKE, PENTAGON SPOKESWOMAN: I know that many people in this building and this town knew Mike Kelly who was killed last night just south of Baghdad. Mike was just a phenomenal journalist with an enthusiasm for his work that was surpassed only by his passion for his family.
MORTON: Kelly died "The Washington Post" reported in a Humvee accident. He had criticized restrictions on the press in the first Gulf War which he covered, but likes the embedding system.
MICHAEL KELLY, "THE WASHINGTON POST": This way you at least have a couple of very good things potentially. You have a real journalist with all the units. That's the first good thing. The second good thing is that there's no official censorship structure.
MORTON: Kelly was a conservative with a sense of humor, a sense of the preposterousness government sometimes displays. He got fired from "The New Republic," too anti-Clinton the publisher thought, went on to the "National Journal" and then "The Atlantic." His last "Washington Post" column published Thursday talked about a body near the bridge across the Euphrates.
"He had been an old man, poor, not a regular soldier judging from his clothes. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march rumbled past him pushing on."
And, Kelly talked about the danger he faced.
KELLY: (Unintelligible) for instance a lot more danger to be wandering around say Chechnya than doing this or wandering around Sierra Leone. I mean here there is some element of danger but you are surrounded by an Army literally who is going to try very hard to keep you out of danger.
MORTON: Kelly died covering a war he believed in, had written columns supporting. He leaves a wife and two sons, aged 6 and 3.
ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECY.: The president expresses his sorrow and his condolences to the Kelly family and the president, of course, expresses his sorrow and condolences to all of those military, civilian, and journalists who have died in this combat.
MORTON: Bruce Morton CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: The owner of "The Atlantic Monthly" said this today. The magazine has had 145 years of good times and bad but no moment more deeply sad than this one now.
We're joined in Washington by one of Mike Kelly's colleagues at "The Atlantic Monthly," James Fallows. It's good to see you on a terrible occasion. Mr. Kelly was one of the most interesting and passionate conservative voices in the country.
JAMES FALLOWS, "THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY": It's certainly true that he's been known best by the general public in the last few years for his newspaper columns which have been fearlessly conservative.
But I think to people in the business, his impact was really in two other things. One was his passion as a reporter which first got national renown 12 years ago during the first Gulf War when he gave remarkable magazine reporting and his book "Martyr's Day."
And the other thing which has been really, and that's what brought him back this time, it was no surprise to any of us that he would want to be as close to the action as he could. The other thing was his joy and passion and leadership as an editor.
You know "The Atlantic" has been under his guidance for the last couple of years and people, I think most people at "The Atlantic" probably did not share, do not share his overall political opinions but there is tremendous loyalty and devotion and gratitude towards him just the spirit that he brought to making journalism as good and as engaging and as timely as it could be.
BROWN: And for all those people watching this who know what reporters do and probably know what publishers do and don't have a clue really what editors do, why does that matter? FALLOWS: It matters because, you know, people think perhaps of an editor is the guy with the pencil who's going through and changing verbs, and that is an important part of high-end journalism.
But, it's even more, I mean, maybe it is in a terrible way appropriate that Mike ended up in a military action because there was a kind of military bravado, in the best sense, to the way he wanted to lead journalistic enterprises, where I remember on about 15 minutes after I heard the first news on September 11, the first communication I had with anybody outside my household was with Mike Kelly, who was calling to say, what can we do? How can we, a monthly magazine with a long lead time, how can we get all over this story that's about to unfold in historic ways and, in some fashion, that people would notice?
So, I think the role of an editor that actually matters most is inspiring people to do the best, you know, bravest job that they can do, and that is what Mike really excelled at.
BROWN: Sometimes when you read Mike's column, he always seemed to me that he saw his world very clearly, very black and white. In fact, did he see gray in a world? Did he see nuance in his world?
FALLOWS: He did, and I think Mike would take no offense since we've had this conversation before in my saying there were various aspects of him, and his column writing persona was a different part of him than you saw in his magazine life, or he was very, very careful and scrupulous about not letting his own decided political opinions, you know, shape the magazine.
And also in his personal life, where he would come across in his columns as somewhat take-no-prisoners guy who you would not want to cross, whereas everybody who knew him was impressed by his warmth, by his humor, by his sense of the absurd, by his decency to people, by his love for his wife and his two small sons and for his family.
And I am sure, among the things he would say if he were here now, would be the concern for the other person who died with him, that was the soldier who was also in that Humvee and that soldier's family.
BROWN: Whatever tiny comfort it brings, our condolences to you and everyone at the magazine. I think our country an important and really interesting voice today, and that is sad. Thanks a lot.
FALLOWS: Thank you.
BROWN: James Fallows of "The Atlantic Monthly". We'll take break. We will update the day's headlines, and we'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(NEWSBREAK)
BROWN: Fredricka, thank you, and have a good rest of the night. I think you got the rest of the night. Thank you very much. It's good to see you back... WHITFIELD: I'll be around a couple of more hours actually.
BROWN: Well, good. Good to have you. She was off in Turkey and back home.
Do we have pictures of the Constellation? OK. All this talk about tanks rolling in to Baghdad and the rest, we ought not lose sight of the fact that there is still an air operation going on. These are live pictures off of video phone coming in from the USS Constellation. We were watching them come in over the last few minutes or so.
There is just a -- almost a constant -- not literally constant, comings and goings of these flights. Now their mission is somewhat different than it was, course, in the early stages. But it's still matters. There's still work to be done. There's work to be done in the north, and there is still risk to be had. Any time a jet takes off one of these aircraft carriers, there is risk in the air, and there is risk in the mission.
And we learn that over the last couple of days. An F-18 was lost just two nights ago, as I recall. One pilot lost in that. So, we -- as we have over the last couple days focused so much on the ground operation as it's closed in to Baghdad, we ought not lose sight of the fact that there are sailors and Navy pilots on board these aircraft carriers, who are also continuing to make their contribution to the American effort in Iraq.
These -- it's almost impossible to describe what it is like, if you haven't done it -- and I have done it once -- to either take off or land on an aircraft carrier. When those things come back, it looks like a mattress in the middle of the ocean for that jet to put down on. And now it appears ready to take off from.
General Clark?
CLARK: That's still remarkable technology and, really, there's no other nation that has that technology and the skill and the team work to put that operation together, Aaron.
BROWN: You have a small city, a city not -- honestly not a whole lot larger than -- or smaller, rather -- than the one I grew up in. Six thousand people or so on those aircraft carriers. It's complicated piece of business.
Baghdad on a Saturday morning. We see the gray and the haze and the sky. And we see people moving around there. And what must all of them be thinking about the day ahead? Surely now they know that at least the very beginning of the American effort inside the city itself is under way. How widely that is known in the city we don't know. But we do know it is known by us.
CNN's Walt Rodgers joins us again. Walt, we want neither to overstate this or understate its significance that elements of the Third Infantry have moved in. Is that right? RODGERS: That is indeed true, Aaron. And it must have been quite a shock for the Baghdad residents when they woke up this Saturday morning to see American tanks rolling through their city.
Here's what we know. Elements of the Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Division have moved in to the south central part of Baghdad itself. This is no longer the outskirts. U. S. tanks from the Third Infantry Division are rolling in Baghdad at this time.
Army sources have confirmed this to CNN. They've told us we can report it. They have also said we should describe this as essentially a reconnaissance foray.
Still, we know their objective. We cannot report the objective at this time. It does appear very clearly, from the maps we've seen, that what the Army is striving to do at this point is carve out chunks of the city, bite off a chunk of Baghdad and then take that chunk and literally dismember the city zone by zone so that each of these zones falls under the control of the U. S. Army.
Again, this is a very significant step forward because, as I say, when the Iraqis of Baghdad woke up this morning in some neighborhoods in the center of the city, they woke up to main U. S. battle tanks rolling through -- Aaron.
Walt, thank you.
General Clark, very quickly, how do the Iraqis defend that, General?
CLARK: They've got to mass forces against the tanks. They've got to get RPG guides. They've got to throw rocket -- they've got to throw Molotov cocktails, gasoline bottles on them. They've got to do something, because this is the kind of thrust that, if it goes in and carves up hunks of the city, it's over.
BROWN: And just really quickly, once established, is there any way to stop it? Once they're sort of positioned there, is the any way to stop it?
CLARK: Yes because one of the major risks -- as you were talking to Michael Gordon before -- one of the major risks is we simply don't have the numbers of troops that the Iraqis presumably could field, counting the special Republican Guards, remnants of other divisions, Fedayeen, civilians given rifles, and so forth.
So, there's always a chance that somehow, they could penetrate behind our positions and roll us up. So, we have to be very alert when we're in here.
BROWN: General, thank you. We'll keep an eye on that as that's going on, its significance. There may be a point where we can report all of the detail that Mike has -- or, rather, that Walter has.
There is one element of we haven't touched on in a while, and that's the question of humanitarian aid and refugees and the like. We'll talk with Ken Bacon in a moment. We take a break first.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: You may recognize our next guest as the face at the Pentagon, and although I haven't seen him, perhaps even the bow tie at the Pentagon during the Clinton years.
Now he's the face of something else entirely. Ken Bacon is the president of the aid group, Refugees International. He joins us from New York to talk about the humanitarian situation in different parts of the country and, Ken, it is very nice to see you again. And I got the bow tie part right.
KEN BACON, PRESIDENT, REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL: Good to be here.
BROWN: Thank you. We haven't seen pictures of masses of refugees over the last two weeks. Is the situation less bad than you thought it might be?
BACON: The situation has been less bad than many of us predicted. Although, to be fair, the predictions of massive displacement, as much as 20 percent of the population of Iraq, were based on a war that lasted at least two to three months. So, in a short war, we haven't seen much displacement.
We may be beginning to see the start of more massive flows out of Baghdad now. There were reports today of groups of 10,000 to 30,000 people leaving Baghdad, going north into the countryside to get away from the fighting.
BROWN: Now, their options are to go where? If they just want to go north, they go to northern Iraq. But if they leave the country, they try to get into Turkey. Where else?
BACON: Probably most will go from Baghdad, either to Iran or to Jordan. One problem is that three of Iraq's neighbors have said they won't accept any refugees. That is Turkey, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The three other countries, Jordan, Iran, and Syria, said that they will accept refugees.
So far, the flow has been slow but, as I say, it could be picking up, and I would expect to see big groups moving toward Iran.
BROWN: And that leads to what? We already see in the south already we've got a humanitarian crisis for some proportion because there's a lack of something as simple and essential as drinking water.
BACON: Yes. Displacement is a problem because it can lead to starvation. It can lead to exposure. It can lead to exhaustion and to disease. So, it's very important to try to get food and water and care to these people soon as possible.
The U.N. is well positioned to do that. It's lined up food, tents, et cetera. But all -- most of this is outside Iraq. The problem is going to be if these people can't get out of Iraq, if they're caught in Iraq, it will be difficult to get aid to them as long as the fighting's going on. BROWN: What we call NGOs, nongovernmental organizations -- how prepared are the NGOs to actually get the food, get the water, get the doctors, get the medicine if, in fact they can get to the refugees?
BACON: They're more and more prepared. They got a late start because they didn't get U. S. Government funding until this week actually. But the U.N. has filled a lot of that gap by, as I say, prepositioning tents, food, and other equipment that is necessary to take care of refugees.
BROWN: Do you think we're heading for a manageable -- any time there are hundreds or thousands of refugees, it's a horrible thing. These are individual lives. But do you think we are heading for a manageable problem?
BACON: It looks that way now, but it's really hard to predict because so much depends on the length and the intensity of the war. If we get in to block by block fighting within Baghdad, if the electricity stays off for a long period of time, interfering with water pumps and sanitation systems, then I think you're going to see people leaving at a much faster rate. And there could be a period where we are overwhelmed, particularly as they're making their way to the borders, and it's difficult to get them food and other support.
Once they get to the borders of Iran and Syria and Jordan, the U.N. and NGOs are well prepared to take care of them -- within limits. But so far the flows have been quite limited.
BROWN: Ken, thank you. Ken Bacon is president now of Refugees International. To the extent that there's ever good news on a subject like this, the news here at least is not as bad as it might have otherwise been, and we appreciate hearing it. Thank you very much. Good to see him. Very recognizable face to many of you.
We saw an image earlier this week of a child getting an education he never wanted or deserved. An education in war. We'll tell you more about that after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: As we got on the subject of humanitarian aid, let's bring General Clark in. I suppose this, General, isn't a classic military problem, but it is a classic problem to winning the peace.
CLARK: It is, and it's a problem that militaries often get blamed for, Aaron, because refugees are moving as a consequence of operations. And in this case, I think, what we're seeing, really, is probably the start of a refugee flow. And it could be significant.
One of the things, though, that comes out from the early indications is that I'm surprised that these refugees are leaving this early at this stage in the battle. It indicates to me that Saddam's local Ba'ath party units don't have the kind of grip on the population that you would have expected because Saddam's success depends, in part, in defending Baghdad on keeping lots of civilians in there and holding them hostage and making them suffer as a result of the American attack.
BROWN: You have a city roughly, give or take, 5 million people. If 500,000 leave, you've got a problem. But there's still 4.5 million people there to cause the American military a problem
CLARK: That's exactly right. But you would think that if this state is organized the way we anticipate it to be, with very tight control by the Ba'ath party with precincts and block by block watching and control the population, that they'd have a hard time getting out, that automobile travel would be restricted, and other things. And apparently that's not the case.
BROWN: Let me just see if this makes sense. I'm just working through this.
For the Americans, it strikes me, there's a two-edge sword here because on the one hand, what the Americans don't want is lot of people in the streets. They want the -- literally -- they want the streets clear. They would -- they don't want a refugee problem. They don't want people flowing out of the city. They just want people to stay where they are, right?
CLARK: Well, yes and no. If there's fighting, and there's firing coming from a building, it would be wonderful for the Americans if they knew that there were nobody in the building, no civilians at all, just fighters. And then you could treat it as a military target.
So, in one respect, we don't want a refugee problem, and we certainly don't want them interfering with the maneuver of our forces and the entry of our forces into the Baghdad region. But on the other hand, in terms of each tactical engagement, if there's something we can do to get the civilian population out of that area so we could concentrate on the fighters, that would be helpful to us.
BROWN: In an individual operation?
CLARK: Yes. Exactly.
BROWN: General Clark, thank you.
Scott Nelson of "The Boston Globe" is on the phone. Scott we talked to a couple of times before along the way, and we'll talk with him now.
Scott, tell us where you are, as best you're allowed, and what you can report.
SCOTT NELSON, BOSTON GLOBE CORRESPONDENT: We're just outside the city of Baghdad right now at the southeast. It's been a long haul the last couple of days for the Marines, eventually fighting their way up, city by city, along the Tigris River coming up. But they're largely there now. I think there's still some pockets of fighting. There's still some pockets, Republican Guard holding out.
And there was relatively intense shelling overnight from artillery positions. But it feels here like it's largely over. The Marines have largely fought the fight that they came here to do, and they're now at the edge of the capital city.
BROWN: Are they aware -- are you aware that some tanks, some number of tanks of the Third Infantry Division, have now entered the city of Baghdad?
NELSON: They're not aware of that. I'll tell you what. When I hang up here and tell them, I'm sure they'll be glad to hear it.
A lot of the fighting here yesterday, as we came up through the towns through the southeast of Baghdad, was, in fact, Marine M-1 tanks against Republican Guard tanks, and I saw lot of blown up Iraqi tanks along the way.
And this morning I actually passed my first Marine tank that had been hit by a tow missile and blown up. So, there have been a lot of tanks fighting here, but the Marines will be glad to hear that the Third ID tanks are actually in Baghdad at this point.
BROWN: We've talked in each of our conversations about the changing mood of the troops that you're traveling with. They've now had -- the last several days very intense for them, not at all easy. They have emerged from that successfully. How has the mood changed over the last several days?
NELSON: I think that there's almost a little bit of pent up emotion here that it feels like we're almost done, but we can't quite let up. I think that's what the Marines are -- you know, the Marines seem to be feeling because there are still pockets of Republican Guard out here, and there are still people who are willing to fight and die against the Marines. And they know that, and they can't completely let down their guard at this point.
It's not as if the fight is over, but it's largely over. I think the large-pitched battles are probably done, and most of the towns have been swept at this point, and I think that there's just a little bit of expectation here. Look, we're almost done, we're almost to the place we set out to find. We just have to finish the job and not take any silly casualties at the end here. Now, let's all get home, I think, is what they're thinking.
BROWN: Let's all get home, indeed. Scott, thanks again. Scott Nelson, who reports for "The Boston Globe" and has been reporting for us as well.
We've assembled a group of people from around the country again tonight to talk a bit about where the country is at this moment. They'll join us after a break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: This time of night, we try and do it around this time every night to get a sense of where the country is, how the country's mood is changing, or staying the same in some respect. We've gathered a couple folks with us tonight. Go ahead, keep rolling here.
Andrei Cherny is a community activist in Los Angeles, California, as I remember it. And Janet Parshall -- I hope, Janet, I have pronounced that right -- is a radio talk show host, and she joins us from the Midwest tonight in Chicago, are you?
JANET PARSHALL, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Boston, actually.
BROWN: In Boston. I'm sorry. Thanks a lot. I know you were traveling today. Let me start with you, Janet. You do -- in the calls that you've been getting in the last two weeks, has there been a change in tone, a change in subject? How have things changed?
PARSHALL: Well, doing three hours a day, which means 15 hours of radio a week, we've had a real good sense of being able to listen to what the culture is saying. And, predominately, Aaron, what we're getting is, probably every day, a greater sense of pride in our armed forces, a greater sense of being reminded again how you define the word hero, and a greater sense not taking freedom for granted.
I'm taking a look at the Iraqi situation of understanding these people are hungry for freedom. The President said it beautifully in his State of the Union address, and it's something that we're seeing lived out, that freedom is not America's gift to the world; it's God's gift to humanity. So, I think for a lot of Americans, they are re- embracing that concept that freedom is an awful special gift we have.
BROWN: I'm always reluctant to label anyone or anything. How would you characterize your program and your audience?
PARSHALL: As a talk show host, we cover a myriad of subjects. We are stationed in the nation's capital. I talk to about 3.5 million people every day, and it's a mix. It would be very easy to say that lot of my listeners are conservative, but based on the some of the mail I get, I don't think that's absolutely a complete representation of the whole audience.
BROWN: Got it.
Andrei, let me turn to you in Los Angeles. You're a pretty political guy. Tell me, sort of -- we got into a conversation last night about how watching all of this sort of petty, political disputes don't seem especially as important as they once did. Do you agree with that?
ANDREI CHERNY, COMMUNITY ACTIVIST: I think that's certainly true. I think you're seeing my generation, really, being confronted with this type of war and this type of conflict for the first time. We had certainly -- what happened in Kosovo or Panama -- you had the 100 hours of the first Gulf War.
But, really, this is the first time we've seen this sort of large scale war with American casualties on a daily basis, and no matter where you are in a political spectrum, I think, for my generation, it has really caused a re-evaluation of some of the things that we hold true and some of the ways that we look at the world, no matter where we come from.
BROWN: Good and bad? CHERNY: Good and bad. Certainly. I think that there is the same sort of spectrum of beliefs in my generation that you see anywhere else.
You know, I'm sitting here in Los Angeles, and certainly there are lot of people in my generation who are out there protesting, out there tying up traffic and lying down in the middle of the streets. And yet, you see young people the very same age from Los Angeles fighting in Iraq, and in a couple cases, so far unfortunately, dying in Iraq. And so you certainly see that same sort of breakdown that you see in the population at large.
But I think it really is becoming a formative, political experience for my generation really in the same way that maybe Munich was for the greatest generation or Vietnam was for my parents' generation. This war, and combined with what happened September 11, is really causing us to really have some basic decisions that we have to make about how we see the world and how we see America's role in the world.
BROWN: Just one more quick one because I want to get back to Janet. Do you think the two sides that you describe, the kids who are protesting and the kids who are fighting, do you think the kids who are protesting connect, in any way, with the young men and women who are fighting?
CHERNY: I think they do. And that's one of the thins that I have been struck by, is that as opposed to maybe previous generations, even the most virulent anti-war protesters will still say, in my experience, that they support the troops. I don't think you're going to see those people spitting on the troops in the same way that you had in the Vietnam generation.
And so, I think there is this fundamental patriotism and a fundamental feeling of connection with the people who are fighting even among the most anti-war protesters. I think they see that we, as a generation -- I think one of the things we are able to do is -- we see things in shades of gray much more than black and white.
BROWN: Let me get Janet back for the last word. Janet, it has seemed to me we have, over the last dozen years or so, live through a pretty cynical time. Do you think that, in any sense, we will come to this as a more idealistic group?
PARSHALL: I think that's a great question, Aaron. And, yes, I think the answer to that is absolutely. I think we get rather cavalier with concepts like duty and honor and sacrifice.
And it's times like this -- and Andrei made a very good point. It's times like this when I think we as an individual and we as a country have to do some personal inventory. What do we believe? Why do we believe it? How are we going to live?
I will tell you, also -- you asked about some of the coverage and some of the sentiment over the last couple weeks from my radio audience. There is a sense that there is a disproportionate amount of media coverage on the protesters, and it is out of balance with the multiple millions of people that have been very forthright in their support.
For example, defendamerica.mil is a Web site that the Department of Defense has put out, and over 10-million people have accessed that to send a letter of support to the troops.
And somehow my audience is sensing that those kinds of stories aren't the ones that are being told, that there's too much of a story of those protesters, and they seem to be very much in the minority that's out.
BROWN: Well, I hear that, too. And, as we often say, news is not the cat that doesn't get -- doesn't climb the tree. It's the one that does. But I -- it's a fair point to make.
Thank you, both. Nice job tonight.
PARSHALL: Thanks, Aaron.
BROWN: Thank you. Join us again.
We'll take a break. We'll update the day's headlines. Our coverage continues in a moment.
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