Mission Accomplished

Cowering in their house with nothing to eat or drink as bombardments and firefights shook their neighborhood, Iyad al-Mashadani and his family dug a 3-foot hole in their yard and drank the brackish water.

"We were sure that we would die," said Mashadani, 32, a car mechanic.

He and his family -- his wife, his six children, his mother, and his father, who has heart disease -- made their way south out of Fallujah on Wednesday and now live in a 6-by-9-foot tent in a refugee camp in Baghdad. Attribution

It's fascinating how different our claims are from the claims of independent observers. Here's ours:

"US officers said the operation took every possible step to minimize civilian casualties."

Compared to this:

"The rules of war protecting civilians and wounded combatants have been broken by both sides in the week-long assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, the human rights group Amnesty International said on Monday.

"Amnesty International fears that civilians have been killed, in contravention of international humanitarian law, as a result of failure by parties to the fighting to take necessary precautions to protect non-combatants," Amnesty said.

Amnesty said 20 Iraqi medical staff and dozens of other civilians were killed when a missile hit a Falluja clinic on Nov. 9, according to a doctor who survived the strike -- though it was not known who fired the missile.

On the same day a 9-year-old boy bled to death after being hit in the stomach by shrapnel. Unable to take him to hospital because of the fighting, his parents buried him in their garden.

Elsewhere a woman and her three daughters were reported killed when their house was bombed, Amnesty said."

We are liberating the Iraqi people by killing them and destroying their cities. Our justification for doing so appears to be that a man who is no longer even there was an evil man who killed them first.

We are forcing democracy on them at the point of a gun. And we have become so full of our own arrogance and pride that we don't even see how totally reprehensible that is.