I have a horrible feeling that, if they're dead and over 14, that will mean they will be counted as "terrorists".

Did you know, Doug, that under Saddam, Falluja was actually one of the main places where there was |Sunni opposition to him? And that, until the US military shot up a peaceful demonstration of people calling for their local school to be returned to them, and killed a bunch of people, the city was relatively content with the occupation.

"On April 28 2003 US soldiers opened fire on parents and children demonstrating against the continued military occupation of their primary school - killing 18 of them in cold blood and injuring about 60 others. Until the killing of those demonstrators, not a single bullet had been fired at US soldiers in Falluja or any of the cities north of Baghdad."

That is from www.guardian.co.uk, a piece by a man called Sami Ramadani, who was a political refugee from Saddam's regime, and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University; it appears in today's Guardian.

The weight of the evidence seems to be that the Al Zarquawi mob have got away before the fighting, and that the "terrorists" firing back are predominantly ordinary locals.

Clearing out "no go areas" is something the people directing occupying armies like to do, because in the short run it provides a sense of achievement. But in the long run it has disastrouse effects. In Northern Ireland, when the British cleaned up "Free Derry" on Bloody Sunday, it fuelled nearly thirty years of war, and made the IRA in effect unbeatable, and destroyed any hopes of an alternative strategy of non-violence.

(And no, I'm not trying to identify two widely different situations - seeking parallels and analogies is a lot different from doing that.)

It seems pretty obvious that "Remember Falluja" will be a rallying cry and a recruiting sergeant for generations. That's how these things work - The Alamo, Custer's Last Stand, Easter 1916, just for starters. People forget how deeply flawed the people engaged in these kinds of episodes often were, and how many mistakes may have made to get into that situation. The "last stand" will always have the power to be a resonant call to arms.

And the really nasty thing is that the kind of peole who are going to be able to make use of that call to arms are going to be murderous terrorists in the Al Qa'eda stamp. Not so much in Iraq maybe, where it's probably going to be nationalists who benefit, but in other places around the world.