BURNING FALLUJA

News coverage last night of US soldiers in Falluja was gruesome. After gunning down an ‘insurgent’ the soldier mutters “That’s him done” like cleaning the stairs. It’s one of the most matter-of-fact-horrific bits of television I’ve ever seen.

As one swing-voter said last night: "We'll unleash the dogs of hell, we'll unleash 'em... They don't even know what's coming - hell is coming. If there are civilians in there, they're in the wrong place at the wrong time." (Sergeant Sam Mortimer, US marines, Channel 4 News, November 8, 2004)

Ex-soldier Jim Massey’s experience seems familiar but jars with the official line that ‘US forces are being very careful.’

As Justin Huggler writes in the Independent: “A city still packed with civilians has been subjected to a withering assault of US air strikes and artillery. Street-to-street fighting was still a very real prospect last night. But outside the Arab world, international criticism of the US attack on the city was unexpectedly muted. There was a sense among many observers that this latest ratcheting of Iraq's agony had become inevitable.”

Complaints about the BBC’s Newsnight have been made via Media Lens. Read the exchange here.

If your still struggling to make sense of it all and wondering how exactly we got into this mess, Bomber Short’s got a new book out: An Honourable Deception?: New Labour, Iraq and the misuse of power Clare Short Free Press, 294pp, £15

The main purpose of book is: "...to explain how a Labour government could have brought the UK to support a disastrous and incompetent policy towards the Middle East which was driven by extreme right-wing neoconservative thinkers in the US".

Well yes indeed Clare.

Short fails to provide any real explanation, although she does shed some new light on the process.

According to the New Statesman: “We learn that true cabinet government has all but disappeared, with most ministers acting as little more than bit-part players whose main function is to rubber-stamp quasi-presidential decisions; and that, in the end, serious analysis and assessment of difficult issues were sacrificed on an altar of collective Chirac-bashing. It is striking that, even as a senior cabinet minister, Short was not given access to many of the most important documents that have subsequently leaked into the public domain. These confirm beyond reasonable doubt that Britain's policy was to support US efforts at regime change in Iraq while dressing it up as something else - the enforcement of Security Council resolutions.”