Fallujah, again

Enjoythedraft.com suggests that Bush won’t call the draft a draft, but watch out for the “No 18-to-25-Year-Old Left Behind Act.”

I feel like I’ve been writing about Fallujah forever. The first time most of us heard the name was when American soldiers shot up a crowd peacefully protesting the occupation of their school. The next day, they shot up a crowd protesting the earlier shootings. 25 dead over both days, and that was it for any possibility of winning the hearts and minds of Fallujah, it wasn’t possible after that. Everything since then has been about subjugation, pure and simple.

When the soldiers withdrew from the school, they left graffiti such as “Eat shit Iraq,” and “I love pork.” By June of last year, I wrote, Fallujah had become “Belfast without the politeness.”

I’ll spare you further recapitulation--although anyone who wants to know more about the history of US-Fallujah relations before we pound the city into dust might wish to use the handy search function. There’s a must-read article in the Guardian by Patrick Graham. He reports that many Fallujans don’t believe there is such a person as Zarqawi. The city authorities say he’s left the city, and I can’t imagine how they would be able to capture him and hand him over if they wanted to.

If you haven’t had enough horror, the Guardian also provides a detailed description of the shooting of a 13-year old Palestinian girl by an Israeli officer. Firing on full automatic.