September 14, 2004 - You saw it on tape. A burning Bradley Fighting Vehicle on Haifa Street in Baghdad surrounded by a crowd of Iraqi men and boys. No weapons were visible. The insurgent fighters who attacked the US unit are long gone. A television reporter was doing a stand-up with the already destroyed US vehicle as a background. Suddenly there is an explosion, the TV man falls toward the camera as he is speaking. He is dying. You see his death. It doesn’t have the impact that it would have were he a familiar face speaking English. He is a familiar face to those who watch Al Arabiya Television and the language that he spoke and they understand is Arabic. A rocket from a US helicopter gunship killed him and some 30 others. Their bodies litter Haifa Street. The rocket attack was necessary, US officials said, to destroy sensitive equipment and weapons aboard the Bradley. It also destroyed the lives of men and boys and a television newsman with the camera running – collateral damage.

It is just one scene in a series of scenes in the drama of the US campaign to tamp down the Iraqi insurgency in time for the election – theirs nest January and ours this November. The dead lying in Haifa Street join the women and children killed from the air in strikes at what are described as “safe houses” in the streets of Fallujah. Death from the air is indiscriminate. Like the rain it falls on the guilty and the innocent alike. Each child killed had a family; a mother and a father; brothers and sisters; grandparents; cousins and aunts and uncles. Who won their hearts and minds this week?

Each innocent’s death that comes as collateral damage sends a new ripple of heartfelt resentment through the pool in which the guerrillas swim. A newsman’s death broadcast almost live becomes the resistance fighter’s most effective recruiting tool; a graphic reminder of what American democracy has come to mean to the Iraqi in the street. We have passed this way before, in the streets and alleys of Saigon; on the trails leading to Mai Lai; and along the twisting waterways of the Mekong Delta. We are hearing body counts from each engagement. First the count of 20 or 30 Iraqis killed and then the quiet announcement of one or two American deaths – a thousand ten as of yesterday. The kill ratio is clearly in our favor – or is it?

More and more it seems that America political and military leadership is intent on fighting the same war we fought in Vietnam using the same tactics while avoiding using the rhetoric of that lost cause and expecting this time the result will be different. We seem to have remembered everything and learned nothing. America did not recognize in 1968 that the real battle had already been lost and that the outcome of that election could not alter the result. The results of the Bush throw of the dice will be unaltered no matter what the result of our election in November. The gamble for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people has already been lost