Mothers and Children, Run and Hide! America is Coming to Town!
by Kirsten Anderberg

I see the same ideas we used in the Vietnam War in play now in Iraq. General Westmoreland said during the Vietnam War, that the more Viet Cong dead, the better, basically. And in the Vietnam War, the U.S. soldiers could not tell ordinary Vietnamese citizens from "the enemy," mirroring our experiences in the Middle East right now. So they shot farmers as well as guerilla fighters. This caused an outcry, so the military told soldiers only to shoot Vietnamese people "if they were running." When that system failed also, the policy often became, if they were dead and Vietnamese, they were just considered Viet Cong (or the enemy). THAT is what I expect to see in Fallujah. If we shot them dead, and they are Iraqi and in Fallujah, they were the enemy militia. Period. Or as the military officials on the Jim Lehrer News Hour intimated, if they stayed in Fallujah, they *must* have been enemy fighters, because we told everyone else to leave. The thing that I did not see the American military officials explain was where all these sick, elderly and parenting citizens of Fallujah were supposed to go! Did we bring in large transport vehicles and moving vans to help these people relocate? Of course not! So, we are just telling the poorest sector in town to *disappear* and if they don't leave, and they are killed, these women, children, and elderly will probably just be tallied as part of the enemy militia in death. Just like Vietnam.

Full story here.