While we were absorbed with the election here in the US, our nation's troops surrounded the city of Fallujah in Iraq and bombed the living daylights out of it. More than 80% of the population has left the city (about 400,000 people), most of them women and children because the "fighting-age" men were turned back at the US checkpoints on the edge of the city. Of course the rest of Iraq, now crime-ridden and impoverished from war and the incompetent US occupation, is a very dangerous place for uprooted families who are missing their able-bodied male relatives. This whole attack on Fallujah is creating an enormous humanitarian crisis and refugee problem.

Nor is the attack on Fallujah accomplishing the US's main goal. The Pentagon and Bush administration keep claiming that Fallujah is the center of the insurgency; yet, since the US has blockaded the city and subjected it to extensive, destructive nighttime bombing raids, insurgent attacks have increased all over the country by more than 30%. For example, on Tuesday (our election day), guerrillas detonated a car bomb that nearly destroyed the Education Ministry in Baghdad and killed a dozen people. An oil well and two pipelines were bombed, completely cutting off oil exports from the north of the country and nearly shutting down Iraq's main oil refinery at Baiji. Roadside bombs and car bombs went off in Samarra, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and on the airport road in Baghdad. US troops fought running battles with insurgents in the city of Ramadi, where a Reuters cameraman was executed by a US sniper. Two bombs targeted Iraqi national guardsmen in Mosul. And on and on. And that's just a few of the attacks that have happened in one day.

The only sane voice on the issue of Fallujah has been UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, who sent a letter to George Bush, Tony Blair, and the Iraqi interim interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. In the letter, Anan urged them to cease attacking Fallujah. The violence, he said, could make peaceful elections in January an impossibility. The only way to handle the security situation in Iraq is through diplomatic, political means. He's right, of course. What the US people don't know, however, is that the Iraqi interim interim government had been negotiating for weeks with tribal leaders in Fallujah and had almost reached a deal. But there was one sticking point: the tribesmen refused to allow US soldiers to go on house-to-house searches in Fallujah for weapons. "Let the Iraqi police and national guardsmen do it," the Fallujah elders said, not objecting to the subject of house-to-house searches at all. "We have faith that Iraqis can do the job themselves." But Ayad Allawi, taking his cue from the Pentagon, refused. In spite of George Bush's rhetoric, the Iraqi security forces are purely for show, with US troops remaining the main hammer of the US occupation.

So the attack on Fallujah will go forward, as bloody and heinous as it is unnecessary. And George Bush should get in line behind Saddam Hussein for a place in the pantheon of Hell.--Maria Tomchick