They've been marching, shouting and demanding to be heard - it's only the school uniforms that mark them out as a new kind of political protester. In a week of unprecedented action, the tactics employed by tens of thousands of schoolchildren have taken the older (and supposedly wiser) of us aback. From the 1,000 pupils who staged a demonstration in their school grounds at St Dunstan's, Glastonbury, to the 300 ambitious 12- to 15-year-olds who attempted to occupy Edinburgh Castle, teenagers are not waiting for anyone to tell them what to do.

[M]uch as I respect Estonia and El Salvador, there is something ridiculous about the list of our "partners" -- a coalition of the anonymous, the dependent, the halfhearted and the uninvolved, whose lukewarm support supposedly confers some moral authority. This is like -- oh, I don't know, wresting a dubious election victory in Florida and claiming a mandate. It lacks a certain verisimilitude.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has begun a campaign it calls, portentously, "Operation End Extremism." The purpose is to expose "the increasing burden U.S. soldiers face on military training bases because of irrational enforcement of environmental laws." The whole thing might be dismissed as another ideological stunt from the committee's reactionary chairman, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, were it not for the fact that the Pentagon is trying to do the same thing. With White House backing, the Defense Department has asked Congress to approve a program it calls the "Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative," which would broadly exempt military bases and some operations from environmental regulation.

Amr Moussa, the head of the 22-member Arab League, said "no Arab with any remnant of conscience can tolerate" the bombing of Baghdad, once the proud capital of the Islamic world.

"The bombing and violence we're seeing on satellite TV should stir the ire of every Arab who sees it," said the secretary-general, who has warned a war against Iraq could "open the gates of hell" in the Middle East.

While many Arabs have little sympathy for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, they say they are furious about the suffering the war is causing innocent Iraqis.

"I feel sad and hurt because there's nothing we can do. The Arabs are weak and America controls the situation," said Saudi Walid Musharraf, a 29-year-old accountant.

"Now everyone here hates America, and even some Americans hate the American government," he said.

Among the veterans of these affairs, the lean, ferrety-faced men with their megaphone voices and mass- produced slogans about socialism and Palestine, there were droves of representatives from that famous if elusive constituency known as Middle England -- worried-looking families wrestling with the business of carrying a placard in one hand and a rolled-up "quality" newspaper under one arm, while keeping pushchairs and toddlers in order.

Other developments across Africa:

• South African President Thabo Mbeki, whose country has been a prominent opponent of attacks on Iraq, expressed regret, saying the war "is a blow to multilateralism".
• The United States has shut its embassies in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
• Nigeria says some of its citizens have been recruited to fight for Iraq against US-led forces and are preparing to leave.
• Eritrea, one of two African countries to join Mr Bush's "coalition of the willing", said it did support the war but added that it was not directly involved in the actual conflict.
• Ethiopia said it had offered the United States the use of its airspace and also landing rights, as requested by the US in relation to the Iraq war.
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu said the attack on Iraq was an "immoral" war in which America was abusing its power.

What most of us know of Iraq we know from just the kind of television we are watching now. It's a nation seen over the correspondent's shoulder, or through the windshield of a fighting vehicle moving into a beige void. But in a way, America knows a great deal about Iraq. We actually know every inch of the country. United Nations inspectors have explored it in the ways that interest us most. Surveillance satellites are constantly watching overhead. We've been making fixed-wing surveillance flights since before the first gulf war. Perhaps in some declassified future, those photographs will serve the same purpose as the aerial photos the Luftwaffe took of England in the late summer of 1940. Now, they provide a clear snapshot of the country as it was, an archeological benchmark against which to measure all future change.

Bush is acting "in effect as a selected dictator," Nader told the Mercury News in an interview Friday. The president has not listened to any of the many retired admirals, generals and foreign-policy experts who have warned against the war, Nader said. And the stated reasons for going to war "have either been disproved or greatly distorted," he said.

The greatest danger will come, Nader said, after the war has been won. Bush, whom he called "a hit-and-run president," will not stick with the difficult, protracted process of rebuilding Iraq and making it democratic, he said. . . .

But it's not his fault, he said. In fact, people could just as easily blame David McReynolds, the Socialist Party candidate in 2000, for giving the key state of Florida to Bush, he noted. McReynolds polled 622 votes in the state, and Democratic Vice President Al Gore lost by 537 votes. Nader, who ran as the Green Party candidate, got 97,488 votes.

"When people ask me this, I say, 'What would you have me do?'" Nader said. "Everybody has a right to run for office."

President Bush plans to tell congressional leaders on Monday that the war in Iraq will cost about $80 billion, administration officials said, three days after both chambers of Congress passed budget plans and authorized tax cuts without a war-cost estimate from the administration.

For weeks, White House officials refused to provide a cost estimate, saying they could not account for the various war scenarios. But officials said Saturday that on Monday, Bush plans to tell congressional leaders he will ask for additional funding of about $80 billion.

Mr. Blair himself has remained steadfastly loyal to Mr. Bush in private as well as in public, but high-ranking members of his government say that the blunt comments that have come out of Washington have repeatedly undermined their efforts to reason with critics of America here.

In contrast to the custom in Washington of keeping presidents at a distance from forums and audiences that might embarrass them, Mr. Blair has actively sought out opponents to try to press home the unpopular American position. He has withstood heckling and a peculiar British form of speaker abuse known as slow hand-clapping. . . .

Britain, a country of 60 million people who buy 14 million newspapers a day, has one of the world's most aggressively competitive presses, and British newspapers are hard on prime ministers in normal times. In the current political atmosphere of Labor domination, they have taken on an added edge, assigning themselves the role of the opposition in British political life that the weakened Conservative Party is unable to fulfill.

But last week there was a notable break in the harsh treatment. The day after Mr. Blair gave the speech of his life in the House of Commons and managed to contain the Labor rebellion, The Independent, a relentless enemy of his war stance, published an editorial with unblushing language suggesting that Mr. Blair's lonely struggle, which seemed to be leaving him isolated and adrift, may have instead worn down his detractors and earned him begrudging respect.

Charred Iraqi corpses smolder in burned-out trucks. Black smoke hangs over bombed cities where U.S. troops battle Iraqi soldiers. Youths greet British tanks with smiles, then sneer when they have passed.

Reuters correspondents in southern Iraq -- some with U.S.-led forces, some operating independently -- watched the war to topple Saddam Hussein unfold on Sunday as U.S. convoys advanced on Baghdad and battles raged for control of key cities. In the desert near the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, just 100 miles south of Baghdad, correspondent Luke Baker traveled through a plain littered with Iraqi bodies and gutted vehicles after U.S. forces fought a seven-hour battle against militiamen desperately trying to halt their advance.

Some vehicles were still smoldering, and charred ribs were the only recognizable part of three melted bodies in a destroyed car lying in the roadside dust.

"It wasn't even a fair fight. I don't know why they don't just surrender," said Colonel Mark Hildenbrand, commander of the 937th Engineer Group. "When you're playing soccer at home, 3-2 is a fair score, but here it's more like 119-0."

For the public on the other side, the media focus was on the treatment of the American prisoners shown on television.

"I was just under orders," said one soldier, who gave his name only as Miller. "I don't want to kill anybody."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it a breach of the Geneva Convention, which bans subjecting prisoners of war to "public curiosity." Baghdad pledged to respect the law.

Iraqi prisoners taken by U.S. and British troops have also been filmed and interviewed by foreign television stations.

Washington's hopes that U.S.-led forces would be welcomed into Iraq as liberators bled into the sand on Sunday, the fourth day of war, as Iraqi troops fought back with determination and guerrilla tactics.

There was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction being used by Iraq in battle. Instead, Iraqi troops were fighting with machinegun-mounted Japanese pickup trucks against squadrons of the world's most formidable battle tank, the U.S. Abrams.

There were reports of between 10 and 15 U.S. troops killed in fighting to secure bridgeheads across the River Euphrates at Nassiriyah, with perhaps up to 50 more wounded.

U.S. General John Abizaid acknowledged it was the "toughest day of resistance" so far. He said Iraqi forces near Nassiriya inflicted several casualties in "the sharpest engagement of the war." There were 12 American troops missing, he added.

"Everybody was predicting they'd be welcomed as liberators but it's working out differently," said one senior Arab official in the Gulf. "The Americans had a hard day today" . . . .

In Kuwait, former oil minister Ali al-Baghli said the time taken to capture Umm Qasr might undermine any faith ordinary Iraqis had that the Americans could topple Saddam Hussein.

"We are astonished that there is still resistance in Umm Qasr after all this time. It is a very small place.

"If it takes them this long to capture Umm Qasr, how long will it take to capture Tikrit or Baghdad?"

The news that one of the American soldiers taken captive by the Iraqis over the weekend is a woman serves as a reminder of how the American military has evolved, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, into an organization where the dangerous jobs of war are performed by both sexes. While women are still barred from some sorts of duty, the case for equal footing is gaining ground.

Thanks to changes in the law in 1994, women, who make up 15 percent of the military, are eligible for about 90 percent of all service positions. Those gains were a recognition of the performance of the 41,000 women deployed as part of Desert Storm three years earlier. Despite legal limits on combat participation, 13 women died and many more were wounded in that conflict.

But while the law opened the door for women a little wider, glass ceilings have held firm and women have made gains in just a small fraction of the jobs supposedly open to them. Helping to hold them back are the remaining taboos and the misperceptions of physical and mental inadequacies that they perpetuate. . . .

The United States, with the most advanced military in history, is simply a laggard on the topic of women in combat. One million women served in the Soviet Army in World War II, and Israel, Canada and South Africa are among the countries that now give women combat roles. The American policies of excluding women threaten the readiness of the armed forces, particularly when there is no draft.

Since the beginning of the new Iraq war on Wednesday, the Qatari news network Al Jazeera has been showing images of corpses. . . . The station really hit paydirt late Friday and throughout Saturday. Al Jazeera provided some of the most shocking war images ever broadcast on television: A field of bodies after the American strike on the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group in northern Iraq, a blood-soaked emergency room at the same location, and most horrendously of all, a luxuriously-paced tour of civilian casualties in Basra. Among those, one will linger in this viewer's mind forever . . . It was the corpse of a boy with the top of his head blown off. The kid's face, while stiff and covered with dust, retains its human features, but beginning at the forehead the skull simply deflates like an old balloon, ending in an unsupported scalp that (with apologies for the mixed similes) resembles the loose hide of skinned animal. . . .

The elements of Jazeera's total and terrible victory over its competitors are pretty basic: It treats news as an immediate and vital resource. Jazeera's reporters take great personal risks for exciting footage and stories. The station has rapidly attained core professionalism -- full coverage of press conferences, comments from all sides, and so on. It is welcome in areas where the western networks are not, and it is absolutely not squeamish about presenting any claim or image. . . .

To the extent that the Jazeera version of events presents a plausible case that America could lose the war, every extra day that the war takes to complete will make even victory look more and more like defeat. (In fact, given that current resistance appears to be coming as much from small bands of guerillas as from Iraq's regular army, and considering the near certainty that jihadists are now eagerly making their way into Iraq, it's no longer clear that the peace will look substantially different from what we're seeing right now.) The more CNN's coverage starts to look like Jazeera's, and the messier the war starts to look, the more it will embolden both opponents of the war and those who actually oppose America. Whether it will also reveal how thin domestic support for the war is remains to be seen: Americans may become more determined to fight as more dead soldiers pile up (though significantly, they will no longer claim to be fighting for democracy).

"Don't let these peace protesters confuse you," Glenn Beck, a conservative radio host from Philadelphia, told the crowd estimated at 10,000 . . . [in Glen Allen, VA on March 23]. "We know we're facing dark and terrible, terrifying times. But I tell you, we will look these times dead in the eye, and we will climb these stairs."

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Beck, whose three-hour program is heard five days a week on more than 100 stations, has helped promote many similar demonstrations under the banner of Rally for America. Some have been financed by radio stations owned by his employer, Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest owner of radio stations, in an arrangement that has been criticized by those who contend that media companies should not engage in political advocacy.

The rally near Richmond was paid for by WRVA, a local radio station that broadcasts Mr. Beck's program. Executives at WRVA, which is owned by Clear Channel, said they had decided to stage the event in response to calls from listeners, who in turn had been exhorted by Mr. Beck to seek venues for such rallies.

Some of the biggest rallies this month have endorsed President Bush's strategy against Saddam Hussein, and the common thread linking most of them is Clear Channel Worldwide Inc., the nation's largest owner of radio stations. . . .

The sponsorship of large rallies by Clear Channel stations is unique among major media companies, which have confined their activities in the war debate to reporting and occasionally commenting on the news. The San Antonio-based broadcaster owns more than 1,200 stations in 50 states and the District of Columbia.

While labor unions and special interest groups have organized and hosted rallies for decades, the involvement of a big publicly regulated broadcasting company breaks new ground in public demonstrations.

"I think this is pretty extraordinary," said former Federal Communications Commissioner Glen Robinson, who teaches law at the University of Virginia. "I can't say that this violates any of a broadcaster's obligations, but it sounds like borderline manufacturing of the news."

"[T]he United States will spend as much next year on defense as the rest of the world put together (yes, all 191 countries). And it will do so devoting 4 percent of its GDP, a low level by postwar standards.

"American dominance is not simply military. The U.S. economy is as large as the next three -- Japan, Germany and Britain -- put together. With 5 percent of the world's population, this one country accounts for 43 percent of the world's economic production, 40 percent of its high-technology production and 50 percent of its research and development. If you look at the indicators of future growth, all are favorable for America. It is more dynamic economically, more youthful demographically and more flexible culturally than any other part of the world. It is conceivable that America's lead, especially over an aging and sclerotic Europe, will actually increase over the next two decades.

"Given this situation, perhaps what is most surprising is that the world has not ganged up on America already. Since the beginnings of the state system in the 16th century, international politics has seen one clear pattern -- the formation of balances of power against the strong. Countries with immense military and economic might arouse fear and suspicion, and soon others coalesce against them. It happened to the Hapsburg Empire in the 17th century, France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany twice in the early 20th century, and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century. At this point, most Americans will surely protest: 'But we're different!' Americans -- this writer included -- think of themselves as a nation that has never sought to occupy others, and that through the years has been a progressive and liberating force. But historians tell us that all dominant powers thought they were special. Their very success confirmed for them that they were blessed. But as they became ever more powerful, the world saw them differently. The English satirist John Dryden described this phenomenon in a poem set during the Biblical King David's reign. 'When the chosen people grew too strong,' he wrote, 'The rightful cause at length became the wrong.'"

The chances of preventing George W. Bush -- a true believer in the cleansing powers of military force if there ever was one -- from going to war with Iraq were always small. But look what the global antiwar movement accomplished: We forced the Bush Administration to take the issue to the UN; we turned out millions of people in the largest coordinated protests in history; we helped embolden swing states like Guinea, Cameroon, Mexico, Chile, Angola and Pakistan to resist US bullying and bribery at the UN Security Council; we put the future of entire governments at risk when they attempted to side with the United States against the will of their own people. And the start of the war has not diminished the energy and creativity of our movement; if anything, it has sparked renewed determination among antiwar forces.

This doesn't sound like a peace movement that is losing. It sounds like a peace movement that lost the first skirmish but is poised to win the larger struggle to put the doctrine of aggressive unilateralism back in the trash bin of history, where it belongs.

It's not hard to run this kind of Web site from the front. The armed services don't have centralized rules governing troops' Internet use, beyond restricting such obvious things as pornography and disclosure of military operational details. Each branch of the military has its own set of general guidelines, but typically delegates decisions about e-mail and Internet access to commanders in the field. There, soldiers can use the military's nonofficial network, the Nonsecure Internet Protocol Network, or Nippernet. Enlisted troops often have access to makeshift Internet cafes in the larger camps.

Maj. C.J. Wallington, team leader for the Army's secure intranet system, Army Knowledge Online, says because of the volume, the Army "can't spend a lot of time" checking soldiers' e-mail. "We put a lot of faith in soldiers to do the right thing," and apply the same discretion to their Internet communications that they'd use in personal conversations, he says.

The Army is considering incorporating blogging into its secure network where troops communicate with each other and their families. If such a system were put into place, the general public would no longer have access to such blogs.

Who has been organizing those pro-war rallies? The answer, it turns out, is that they are being promoted by key players in the radio industry -- with close links to the Bush administration. . . .

Experienced Bushologists let out a collective "Aha!" when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company's top management has a history with George W. Bush. The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks, whose name may be familiar to readers of this column. When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel's chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university's endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire.

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, but a good guess is that we're now seeing the next stage in the evolution of a new American oligarchy. As Jonathan Chait has written in The New Republic, in the Bush administration "government and business have melded into one big 'us.' " On almost every aspect of domestic policy, business interests rule: "Scores of midlevel appointees . . . now oversee industries for which they once worked." We should have realized that this is a two-way street: if politicians are busy doing favors for businesses that support them, why shouldn't we expect businesses to reciprocate by doing favors for those politicians -- by, for example, organizing "grass roots" rallies on their behalf?

[T]he British government issued a dossier Feb. 3 on Iraq's "infrastructure of concealment," a paper praised by Powell in his own indictment of Iraq before the Security Council two days later. But the British dossier was subsequently determined to have been lifted in large part from published articles and a researcher's paper -- not from fresh intelligence.

Powell's UN presentation was densely detailed, speculating on the meaning of satellite photos, audio intercepts and other, unattributed information. But his claims drew a rebuff from Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector. Among other things, Blix said that a satellite photo the American secretary contended showed movement of proscribed munitions "could just as easily have been a routine activity."

By the time of his next report, March 7, Blix was referring to such U.S. statements as "contentions" and "claims."

Two months after U.S. officials said they had begun providing "significant" intelligence to the inspectors, Blix told the council he was still awaiting "high-quality information." He said no evidence had emerged to support U.S. contentions Iraq was producing chemical or biological weapons underground or in mobile laboratories.

The inspectors, privately, disparaged the "leads" they were receiving from the U.S. government.

With a few notable exceptions (such as Robert W. Kagan and, more recently, Kenneth Pollack), the Iraq hawks' favored strategy for toppling Saddam involved supporting the Iraqi opposition and, in particular, the Iraqi National Congress. Most of the dirty work of regime change, they argued, would not have to be done by the United States, but rather could and would be done by Iraqis themselves. The only things needed from America were financial and diplomatic support, training and equipment, and air cover. The actual fighting, if there was any, would be contracted out to local forces. . . .

But the war's progress to date is enough to put paid to the idea that Iraq was a paper tiger and that Saddam might have fallen quickly and easily to the less-than-daunting military prowess of the INC.

The percentage of the public thinking the war was going very well was as high as 71% on Friday and Saturday, only to fall to 52% on Sunday and 38% Monday as the public learned of American casualties and POW's. Overall, the interviews by Sunday and Monday found about as many people thinking the war effort was going just fairly well (41%) as opposed to very well (45%). Only 8% went as far as to say the war effort was not going well.

But there are no indications that declining optimism about progress in the war is affecting overall support for military action or President Bush's handling of the conflict. Roughly seven-in-ten Americans say it was the right decision to use military force against Iraq, a figure that remained fairly stable during the polling period. And about the same number (71%) give the president positive marks for his handling of the war.