"...a city from which everyone has walked away"

Jesus H. Christ:

FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 15 -- Even the dogs have started to die, their corpses strewn among twisted metal and shattered concrete in a city that looks like it forgot to breathe.



The aluminum shutters of shops on the main highway through town have been transformed by the force of war into mangled accordion shapes, flat, sharp, jarring slices of metal that no longer obscure the stacks of silver pots, the plastic-wrapped office furniture, the rolls of carpet. These things would be for sale, except there are no traders, no customers, hardly any people at all in the center of Fallujah.



As Brig. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik, deputy commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was touring a western neighborhood near the neck of a bridge that crosses the Euphrates River, a firefight erupted between Marines conducting the house sweep and insurgents hiding on a narrow street.



The sound of the skirmish intensified, and Hejlik walked toward the crack of guns and bang of mortars. His security detail and aides followed behind him, guns at the ready. Hejlik watched for a while and then returned to his vehicle.



Asked how the battle was going, Hejlik looked out at the deserted street. "This is what we do," he said. "This is what we do well."

Meanwhile, the troops -- you know, those guys that have inspired people do put those magnetic ribbons on the back of their cars...and otherwise not even think about what they're going through -- are reaching the breaking point:

The U.S. military is investigating the videotaped fatal shooting of a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner by a U.S. Marine in a mosque in Fallujah, a Marine spokesman said.



The dramatic footage was taken Saturday by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC television, who said three other prisoners wounded a day earlier in the mosque had also apparently been shot the next day by the Marines.



The incident played out as the Marines 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment, returned to the unidentified Fallujah mosque Saturday. Sites was embedded with the unit.



Sites reported that a different Marine unit had come under fire from the mosque on Friday. Those Marines stormed the building, killing 10 men and wounding five, Sites said. The Marines said the fighters in the mosque had been armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 rifles.



The Marines had treated the wounded, he reported, left them behind and continued on Friday with their drive to retake the city from insurgents who have been battling U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq (news - web sites) with increasing ferocity and violence in recent months.



The same five men were still in the mosque on Saturday, Sites reported.



On the video, as the camera moved into the mosque during the Saturday incident, a Marine can be heard shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men was only pretending to be dead.



"He's (expletive) faking he's dead!"



"Yeah, he's breathing," another Marine is heard saying.



"He's faking he's (expletive) dead!" the first Marine says.



The video then showed a Marine raising his rifle toward a prisoner lying on the floor of the mosque. The video shown by NBC and provided to the network pool was blacked out at that point and did not show the bullet hitting the man. But a rifle shot could be heard.



"He's dead now," a Marine is heard saying.

I don't know about you, but I'm not going to sit in judgment on these guys. Many of them are on stop-loss orders, they haven't a clue why they're there or what on earth they're supposed to be doing. They're told that they're liberating the very people that they're told to kill; but that everyone they come across is "the enemy."



By the way, THIS is exactly the sort of thing John Kerry told Congress about back in 1971. Those guys too were losing their humanity in an unjust botch job of a war. He wanted it stopped. The Swift Boat Liars wanted to stay there and kill a few hundred thousand more people.



Doesn't that kind of put the Swift Boat Liars into perspective now?



UPDATE (via Poetic Leanings): Baghdad Burning is written by a female blogger from Iraq. Unless you believe that everyone in Iraq is the enemy (in which case ask yourself who we're liberating, since that's now the Bush Administration Official Reason for the War), and even if you do, go read her perspective on this incident. These aren't CGI characters in Grand Theft Auto that we're killing over there.