'And here's Tommy Franks, the children's entertainer...'

We'll be told the town of Nasiriyah has been taken by the coalition to rescue a little girl's sick tortoise

It does all make sense. We're flattening the place because we're committed to rebuilding it. To prove this another rebuilding contract was handed out yesterday, to Dick Cheney's old company. It's as if an arsonist burned your street down, then said: "The good news is my brother-in-law can put it back up at a very reasonable price. And sorry about your dead daughters, but my cousin's an undertaker so he'll sort you out a lovely urn at a competitive rate." And then went on television to announce: "For some reason they're not welcoming me as much as I predicted."

We're shown round-the-clock pictures of our boys finding ways of getting clean water and medicine into Basra. I'm no military genius, but one way might have been not to impose sanctions for 12 years that prevented medicine getting into Basra. Maybe that's the cause of all this friendly fire. One lot's trying to take the stuff in while another lot fires at them because they haven't been told the rules have changed.

But we won't know because instead of spoiling the jollity by doubting Pentagon briefings, the news shows us hours of footage of troops dishing out water to grateful Iraqi children. Soon the news will begin: "Marines enter Baghdad dressed as clowns in an effort to entertain Iraqi children," and we'll cross to Tommy Franks on a tank making a poodle out of bendy balloons. Then we'll be told the town of Nasiriyah has been taken by the coalition, in order to rescue a little girl's sick tortoise.

Yesterday it was reported, without a hint of doubt, that a military building in Basra had been destroyed "leaving a school and hospital on either side completely undamaged". Surely they can take this further, and tell us: "This morning a Baath party office was demolished by bombs so smart that none of the staff even noticed. 'I slept through the whole thing' said a cleaner on the fourth floor, who was left levitating after the blast before being brought down by marines who gave her a full English breakfast and a milkshake."

And they've managed to bomb the inevitable marketplace. The excuse will probably be: "We can confirm this bomb killed 12 people, but we have it on good authority they were right bastards. The women selling tomatoes at the stall next door are quite pleasant, and they were hardly burned at all."

And no one appears to question how, in this war of precision, we've managed to land bombs in Turkey, Syria and Iran. Call me a perfectionist, but shouldn't precision entail landing in the right country? Even Hannibal didn't take his army and his elephants across the Alps and announce: "Comrades, our struggle has been hard but now we are ready to engage with Rome. Oh shit, this is Austria."

And of course there's the horror at Iraqi cruelty towards prisoners of war, breaking the Geneva Convention by putting them on television and asking such questions as "How old are you"? Whereas the Americans employ the legal, humane approach, which is not to show prisoners on television until their heads are in a sack, so preserving their identities. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has broken 15 articles of the Geneva Convention, so it could be argued the Iraqis still have a few goes in the bank. Maybe they'll dress them up as Mick Hucknall and Alanis Morrissette and make them compete in a special Stars in Their Eyes.

The promise of this "road-map" to a Palestinian state is repeated without asking why, 12 years after identical promises at the last Gulf War, it seems to have re-emerged right now. I remember this technique from when I was 17. I'd agree to tidy up, then make no effort until I wanted to borrow the car, and renew the promise. Every Gulf War the Americans say to the Arabs: "We're just getting round to it. Now just support our invasion and we'll do it in the morning."

News of the Scuds launched towards Kuwait were greeted uniformly as proving Saddam had banned weapons, though Scuds weren't banned as long as their range was below an agreed figure. They might as well have said: "In a shameful display of cruelty, Republican Guard troops today spat at F111s as they were bombing a suburb of Umm Qasr."

And then they wonder why the Iraqis aren't celebrating the arrival of a force that boasts of the shock and awe that incinerates their city, and whose media gloats "750 killed", as if we've won an Olympic medal.

One response to all this is to suggest that it was alright to oppose the war before it started, but now it's on you have to support it. Yet the opposition to this war clearly had an effect, as the Americans are severely touchy about causing the even more massive carnage that could lose them the fragile backing they have. That opposition is the only weapon that can stop this business spiralling into a terror that could leave Dick Cheney's company in work for a thousand years.