Fallujah and the end of the road

Last week four civilian contractors wanted to take a shortcut through Fallujah and ended up being shot, their bodies burned, dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge.

As Strother Martin says in Hud, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” We call them civilian contractors. The Iraqis call them mercenaries and armed thugs. Bush says they hate our freedom. The Iraqis say they hate the freedom of Halliburton stealing their oil. They hate the freedom of mercenaries and U. S. soldiers killing Iraqi women and children.

In reprisal for the murder of the four civilian contractors/mercenaries the United States shelled and bombed Fallujah using internationally banned cluster bombs and killing more than 600 people. This was such a horrific atrocity it united the Sunnis and Shi ites in opposition to the U. S. occupation. Shi ite convoys of food and medical supplies drove to Fallujah from Baghdad, even though Shi ites remember Fallujah as the site of the prison that held Shi ites critical of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Resistance to U. S. and coalition forces has dramatically intensified. Armored Personnel Carriers, helicopters, three Humvees and 10 tanks have been destroyed. The British base in Basrah was shelled. Al-Jazeera TV showed footage of two dead U. S. civilians identified as CIA operatives. A wave of kidnapping has subsided, after clerics condemned the tactic. Seven Halliburton employees are still being held.

Starting at noon on Sunday there was a fragile cease-fire, though U. S. snipers continued to fire on people, killing 11 and wounding 50 after they had agreed to the truce, according to Al-Jazeera.

U. S. forces told civilians to leave Fallujah. According to eyewitnesses, there are now thousands trapped in the desert with no place to go.

The battle of Fallujah is over. The war in Iraq is over. Any moral justification we could have claimed for invading this country was surrendered in the brutal reprisals this past weekend. Further, we had justified our continued occupation of the country by saying if we left, the Sunnis and the Shi ites would go for each other’s throats. We know now that they hate us more than they hate each other.

It is time for the Unite States to pack it in, get back on the bus and leave. They don’t want us there. The troops don’t want to be there (suicide and desertion rates among U. S. occupying forces is at an all time high). The only people that benefit from our continued presence are Halliburton and Dick Cheney and George Bush and his oil buddies.

As the rap song says, “Don’t give me no shit about blood, sweat, tears and toil. It’s all about the price of oil.”

BRING THE TROOPS HOME, NOW!