A longer look at Chinook.(on the right)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 4

LET'S say the obvious by acknowledging that it is obvious. If my son had been killed on that Chinook helicopter, the loss would have destroyed my life, and his mother's. Destroyed is the word one uses when enduring calamitous losses. Though in fact one does endure such losses. Consider Jackie Kennedy. She survived it; so will the mothers, fathers, and spouses of the victims of the Fallujah missile.

What is one shade less than absolutely predictable is whether our foreign policy will survive that anti-helicopter missile. What happened during the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 was categorically different from what happened in Fallujah. The Tet offensive in fact failed. And it was a major, concerted offensive aimed at, no less, a hundred targets. The North Vietnamese didn't prevail over the South Vietnamese, but they can be said to have prevailed over U.S. policy. After Tet, the way was paved for the retreat of 1972 and the surrender of 1975.

Fallujah has been called by one observer "the battlefield of all Iraq." It is perhaps the central stronghold of Saddamization. The papers depict youth there throwing rocks at U.S. military tanks and trucks, and shouting out their joy at the news of Americans dead. One's instinct is to curse the moral cretins and to remove from them further occasions of pleasure by shipping U.S. military out of their sights. They can't hit U.S. helicopters flying over ... what? The Appalachians? Iowa? But the idea is that U.S. aircraft should be safe wherever they fly, and we are in Iraq because of its infestation. You cannot fly safely there, the reason being a Stalinist dictatorship of which Fallujah was a flower before the youth captured on camera throwing stones were even conceived. It is not fair, and certainly not wise, to be angry at youth who are simply doing the spastic thing: firing at U.S. soldiers because they are "foreign," and safer to throw stones ...