That's how a young Iraqi woman responded when asked by a reporter why she, along with hundreds of other expatriates, were returning from Jordan to their war-torn country, and if she would use a weapon. While she said she'd fled the country to escape from Saddam's tyrannical rule, her love of country meant much more to her than her hatred of the man and his regime, and for which cause she would, unflinchingly, lay down her life.

That nationalistic pride, and indomitable will she showed, sent a clear message as to why the battle for Baghdad will not be a pushover; and why-God forbid- it could conceivably be as prolonged and bloody as, say, the battle at Leningrad in WW11, in which 640,000 died from starvation alone during the two-year long siege. What courageous and self-sacrificing people they were, and so, too, the Iraqis may be.

From what I can tell sitting in my armchair half a world away from the war, it looks like our efforts so far to convince the Iraqi people to recognize, with words and bombs (mostly the latter) the sheer folly of their continuing to wager on their flabby, middleweight champion Saddam "low blows" Hussein pulling off an upset by whipping our undefeated heavyweight champ, Uncle"KO 'em" Sam, hasn't paid off. And what a revolting development it was, when Saddam hit Sam with a rabbit punch that "shocked and awed" our generals over the way his troops were fighting as ferociously as "a junkyard dog," instead of behaving as they did in the Gulf war, like a toothless tiger who shrunk away in terror at the first sounds of battle.

Their strength was also admittedly vastly underestimated (move over General Custer), with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saying before the war began "that no more than 70,000 troops would be needed to do the job." (Currently, the American forces in the Gulf region stands at 250,000, with another 120,000 on the way.) But notwithstanding the numerical advantages we have over Iraqi forces in manpower and munitions, the unexpected toughness, flexibility, and brutality that they've displayed makes them a worthy adversary. For as that saying goes, "it's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog that counts."

As an alternative to launching an all-out attack on Baghdad, Secretary Rumsfeld has suggested laying siege to the city, in the hope that its citizens would rise up against Saddam's regime. But he quickly added that there'd be no cease-fire during that period. Huh? Surely he doesn't mean to say, that while the city is under siege, we'd continue dropping 4,000 pound "bunker busters" on 'em? If so, our image in the eyes of the world would be so low it would make the stock market look like it's hitting an all-time high.

But whenever the guns are finally silent, we'll be faced with the equally, if not more, daunting task of winning over their hearts and minds, and convincing them that our motives in invading their country were as pure as "the new fallen snow," and devoid of any self-serving purposes. And that won't be easy to do, especially with those who suffered the loss of friends and family members in combat, or by bombs.

To end on an upbeat note, it "warmed the cockles of my heart" when I saw a film clip the other day of a GI giving some candy to a young Iraqi school girl, who ran to show her classmates what she'd gotten, and how they then approached him, however hesitantly, to also get a piece of candy, not from an enemy soldier, but from a kind-hearted person. That one brief snapshot renewed my hopes that the barriers that now exist between us and the Iraqis may yet disappear. And I'd like to think that the north Korean kids we tossed candies to as we roared by in our tanks will also have remembered me and my tank crew in the same way.