There were "some very tough days ahead" for both sides in the Iraqi conflict, according to a spokesman for US Central Command (Centcom). Déaglan de Bréadún reports.
But speaking to The Irish Times at Camp As Sayliyah in the capital of Qatar yesterday, Lieut Col Ed Worley of the US Air Force insisted that allied forces would be victorious.
Asked about the battle that is clearly looming for control of the Iraqi capital, he said that "taking Baghdad as a piece of territory is not the goal". The goal was to overthrow the Iraqi regime and remove weapons of mass destruction.
"Now, if we have to actually go in and take Baghdad to make that happen, we will. Will it be brutal? We think that there are some very tough days ahead for both our forces and the Iraqi forces but the bottom line is, our objectives are clear, our forces are well trained, our forces are well prepared, and our forces will prevail."
Despite claims by pundits and commentators that the allied military campaign was going wrong, Lieut Col Worley stoutly insisted: "We are right on schedule, we are where we want to be and we are taking the fight to the enemy."
I put it to him that the allies must have been surprised by some of the developments on the battlefield.
"You can never predict every twist and turn that a conflict might take," he said. "To say we are surprised, however, would be a bit misleading. You anticipate every option that the enemy might have before it.
"We know that this regime uses brutality, we know that this regime uses suicide-bombers, we know this regime has a history of using human shields, so none of those caught us by surprise."
I suggested that public opinion in the US and Britain had a lower tolerance of casualties than the Iraqi side and this could have an effect on the allied military operation. "Well, there are always those folks that think there is never any reason to go to war. I don't think that that pressure will be so great in this case that we will have to change our strategy. The thing that you point out there, though, that is very clear, is that the Iraqi regime is willing to take more casualties. That is because they have no regard for life."
How seriously did he take the Iraqi threat to unleash 4,000 suicide-bombers against allied forces? He said he did not know whether to treat the figure literally or as a "representative number", and added: "We certainly know that there is a history of suicide-bombers, especially in this part of the world, a lot of people who are zealous, if you will, for their cause and are willing to do anything to get their point across. I mean, over the years, how many suicide-bombers have we seen in this part of the world? So, suicide-bombers don't surprise us."
Concerning the explosions which killed numerous civilians in two Baghdad marketplaces last week, he said the allies were still investigating: "As soon as we have clear evidence one way or the other, we will release that information."
I pointed out that Centcom had acknowledged it carried out an attack 300 feet from people's homes in Baghdad because, it says, Iraqi missiles and launchers were stored there. "We had to take them out because they were a threat to coalition forces on our approach to Baghdad. They were viable military targets and any blood that resulted from that attack is on the hands of Saddam Hussein and his regime."
He continued: "We go to great lengths to minimise what we call collateral damage on our attacks but there are those targets that we will have to hit. We go to great, painstaking detail determining how, for example, the size of the bomb, the type of bomb it is, will impact in the area. We actually model all this out with a computer programme to minimise the collateral damage and at the same time achieve the desired military effect.
"We go to great, great, great pains to eliminate that. It is an unfortunate thing in war, though, that sometimes innocent people die and, again, if Saddam Hussein and his evil regime had agreed and co-operated with the UN Security Council resolutions that called for his country to disarm, and he had stopped persecuting people the way he has, we wouldn't be sitting here having this discussion today."
Asked if he would venture an opinion on the state of mind of the people around Saddam Hussein at present, he said: "We would certainly welcome any assistance in ridding the country of its leadership right now. I am not going to try to get inside the heads of those folks that are close by, but I can tell you that, as we press closer and closer, the circle is going to tighten on him."
He believed President Saddam could still use chemical weapons in a desperate attempt to save himself: "Nothing that he would do would surprise us. We are certainly prepared for that. We are expecting it. And we have taken all of the proper precautions that we can as we go down that road toward Baghdad."
He takes the line of his commander, Gen Tommy Franks, in refusing to speculate how long the war will last: "I am not going to 'go there', because my commander isn't going to go there. He won't say how long this is going to take. We will encounter the enemy at the time and place of our choosing and we will press the fight and we will win."
So why weren't more Iraqis welcoming allied forces as liberators?
"Maybe it is because they have got machine guns trained on them or something like that, or they don't want to be like the woman who waved at the (allied) convoy coming through and (later) the convoy saw that she had been hanged."
Asked for his response to the comment by a US general that "this is not the enemy we war-gamed against", Lieut Col Worley said: "I can't address that, because I don't know what enemy he war-gamed against."