September 24, 2003 - CNN is broadcasting the story of a firefight near Fallujah. According to the account a detachment of the 82 Airborne was attacked and returned fire. One Iraqi was killed in the exchange according to Central Command. The New York Times, in an Alex Berenson bylined article, relates the account of a coordinated ground-air attack on an apparently unarmed and unresisting Iraqi family home outside of Fallujah.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/international/middleeast/24IRAQ.html

According to the article several of the sleeping family members were wounded and three were killed. A PR representative of the 82nd confirmed the operation and said that the attack on the farmhouse was in reaction to the unit taking fire.

Do both accounts refer to the same incident? Is one or the other account true? Is either the official account or the Berenson article based on fact? Where does the truth lie?

One tragedy of this war is that we cannot be sure. We are so used to official spinning of the facts that we don't trust the official line anymore. It is not a new phenomenon. Some of us, including the Secretary of State, are old enough to remember the first official accounts of an engagement at an obscure village called Mai Lai.

In some important sense it makes no difference whether Berenson's article, based on interviews with the Iraqi survivors and his personal view of the scene is wholly accurate. Berenson's account gives credence to the image of American soldiers as brutal instruments of an alien occupation too widely held by the Iraqi people.

Those of us who were brought up with postwar WWII movies remember the images of the SS occupation of Europe and the heroic resistance of the French people. It is hard not to read the Berenson article and not have those images well up in our memories.

The President said yesterday that restoration of Iraqi sovereignty will not be hurried or delayed by the wishes of "outside parties". If the process includes the security techniques described in the Berenson article we will be no more successful in bringing our version of democracy to the Iraqi people that the SS was in bringing fascist "democracy" to the French.

We are reminded constantly that Saddam's regime was brutal and that he slaughtered his own people. I doubt that it makes a lot of difference to the family described in the Berenson article whether the bullets that killed and wounded their fathers and sons were fired by the Republican Guard or the 82nd Airborne. The brutality of the deaths and injuries is not made more palatable by the source of the lead.

The history of the past half century tells us that the path to peace in the Middle East cannot be cleared with bullets. In the words of Judeo-Christian scripture, you reap that which you sow. What crop are we planting in Iraq? If we can't make an omelet without breaking Iraqi eggs maybe it is time for a change of diet.