Another day, another week and another year of US occupation of Iraq. And another campaign of "liberation" of an Iraqi town. Fighter jets and battlefield artillery will be used to level houses, and demolish homes; Iraqi puppet troops (these are Iraqi militias, make no mistake about it) will be used to give it a local flavor, and to minimize US causalties. Let the Iraqis do the fighting and the daying, members of Congress often hector. To be sure, Zarqawi's name will be invoked, and Time and Newsweek and People (are they not all the same?) will publish whatever their inside government sources will tell them regarding some sinister plot by "foreign terrorists" who were planning to move from Tal Afar to US shores. The American public, who are busy dealing with a human disaster on their own territory, will not even notice a disaster inflicted by US occupation on the people of Tal Afar, and the people of Iraq. I never thought that a war, an occupation, will turn to be like reruns of an old sitcom. People in the US are barely noticing that there is a war, an American war, being launched in Iraq on a daily basis, and that Iraqi civilians (and I am not talking about Zarqawi and his infinite number of "senior aides") are dying in the hundreds every week. The peace movement, or what was the peace movement, is barely visible and barely making noises. Would things have been different if the people under occupation were white, Christian, and European? They would not have been occupied in the first place, and the US public would not have tolerated the killing of more than (at least) 20,000 Iraqi civilians. Civilians. Do people here know what this legacy of the US war and occupation will mean for years to come? I bet you that if you hear from an Iraqi ten years from now, when US troops would have been long gone, about Iraqi public anger at US destruction and violence most Americans would not even know what he/she is talking about. Just as Americans never understood why Iranians were mad at the US back in 1978-79. Americans are often told (by their government and their media) that when people express anger at the US anywhere in the world it is only because those people suffer from fanaticism and religious hatred, or because the French are genetically arrogant. That is all. America is innocent around the world after all.