Good Friday?

One has to wonder - although we can always hope - whether this temporary cease in the battering of Fallujah will do anything to calm tempers down. It sounds, however, that the American offense was pretty much outnumbered so perhaps we need the breather even more than the Iraqis.

Like many people, I have a hard time with what I saw happen to those contractors last week and about the Japanese kidnap victims this week.

However, go to Blackwater's site - read about them - and you understand that Blackwater doesn't go in with the purpose of serving nutritious meals for hungry kids. They're private army - and remember, Rumsfeld wants to privatize the military - and reports are that the typical Blackwater folks drive around Iraq everywhere with a gun or guns pointed out the window, ready to shoot. In other words, I'm not sure that Blackwater folks haven't perpetrated some pretty terrible acts, too. Sorry, folks, but not everyone drawing a check either directly or indirectly from the DoD is a nice person and a humanitarian.

As many Americans and other forces have been lost in the past two weeks, the number of dead Iraqis in Fallujah is skyrocketing. Many are, most likely, innocent civilans caught in the crossfire because we stepped up operations at a time when our troops are in graver and graver danger, their morale shrinking, hopes of getting out soon shrinking fast, and with what sounds like pretty rotten support coming in from command (different soldiers have told stories about being surrounded, beaten upon even by old woman and children, and denied evacuation from central command. We sent a missile into a mosque as if to remind the entire Muslim world that we don't give a damn about their religion.

I'm also quite concerned that the number of casualties we're hearing about is just a smidgeon of the real numbers. Bush and Company work very hard to control every detail of information, and in a time of serious heat, they aren't going to think twice about fudging the numbers to make the situation look less horrible than it is.