[Ramona_A_Stone]

FALLUJAH, Iraq (April 11) - More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in Fallujah since Marines began a siege against Sunni insurgents in the city a week ago, most of them women, children and the elderly, the head of the city's hospital said Sunday...

...Asked about the report of 600 dead, Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said: ''What I think you will find is 95 percent of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting.''

''The Marines are trained to be precise in their firepower .... The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the Marines are very good at what they do,'' he said.

A day earlier, Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, said his battalion - one of three in or around the city - had confirmed 40 Iraqi insurgents were killed and 19 others were likely dead throughout the entire campaign.

Residents started burying bodies in the soccer fields starting Friday, when there was a pause in fighting to allow people to tend to the dead...

...At one of the fields, which residents dubbed the ''Graveyard of the Martyrs,'' an AP reporter saw rows of freshly dug graves with wooden planks for headstones over an area about 30 yards wide and 100 yards long.

Some headstones bore the names of women; others had markings indicating the dead were children...
AP-NY-04-11-04 1548EDT

Well, we'll let the head of the Fallujah Hospital and Col. Byrne argue about the indentities of the dead, but hey, killing only 600 people to get 40 insurgents sounds like a helluva bargain don't it?

Everyone feel more secure now? I know the Iraqis probably do.

Vietnam analogies are deeply imperfect when discussing the war in Iraq. Still, it can't be a good sign for the Bush administration that so many people have begun talking about the Tet offensive.

The young soldiers who were risking their lives last week in places like Falluja were not born in 1968 when the North Vietnamese and their supporters staged a multipronged attack on the United States forces during the Tet holiday. They were eventually routed, but the offensive marked the beginning of a shift in the attitude of the American public. Slowly, former supporters of the war began asking what the point was. The South Vietnamese allies appeared to be a weak reed; the North Vietnamese and their supporters were obviously prepared to keep fighting forever. The civilians caught in the middle wanted nothing but to be left alone. The United States seemed trapped in a bad story, with no way to change the plot.

It's not necessary to argue about the vast differences between the Mideast and Southeast Asia, between Saddam Hussein and Ho Chi Minh. The lesson of Tet that President Bush needs to embrace is that the American people will faithfully follow a commander in chief through a difficult course, but only if they have faith in the mission.

The current chaos in Iraq can be traced to decisions that were made earlier in the invasion. Gen. Eric Shinseki ran into enormous political flak when he estimated that several hundred thousand American troops would be needed to stabilize the country, but right now he's looking prescient. The disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the reliance on slightly trained Iraqi security forces with dubious loyalties are also at least partly to blame for the current problems. So is the Bush administration's decision to invade without the help of the United Nations or broad international support.

But if the goal was clear, and people understood how to reach it, Mr. Bush could compensate. He could even bolster the desperately straitened military with a draft if Americans understood the need to sacrifice. But the public was given the impression that the war in Iraq would be sacrifice-free — for everyone but the military families. And the goal has gone from destroying weapons of mass destruction to ousting a repulsive dictator to stopping terrorism to establishing a free and stable democracy in the Arab world.

It is hard for the American people to envision the road to a better Iraq when they have not been introduced to Iraqi leaders with popular backing who are committed to tolerance, civil rights and democracy. Even the moderate Shiite clerics were shaky on these issues and now their standing appears to have been weakened by the current surge of anti-Americanism. The crackdown on former Baath Party leaders has left the coalition forces with literally no one to negotiate with when it comes to stopping the violence in Sunni areas. The feckless Iraqi Governing Council created by the occupation authorities has lost credibility by its mute passivity in the current crisis.

It is hard to accept the deaths of young men and women when all the world's other military powers, save Britain, have chosen to sit this one out. The ill-prepared troops who form the contributions of places like Ukraine and Bulgaria seem to need protection themselves. With less than 90 days before the symbolic transfer of authority to an Iraqi governing body, the United States has not even seriously started working out the arrangements for bringing the United Nations into Iraq as a real partner.

The rationale for the American military presence in Iraq has quickly morphed into a negative one. If the troops leave, bloody civil war would probably follow and Iraq, which had not been a haven for terrorists, could easily become one. But if there is no vision of a workable exit plan with a better outcome, even that terrible prospect will lose its power to convince the public that this is a fight worth continuing.

What we need desperately is a clear mission, a believable strategy for success, a morally viable exit plan and international involvement. Instead, the administration's current strategy seems to be simply urging perseverance. Staying the course is noble when the cause is right. But perseverance for the sake of perseverance is foolhardy.