The GIs call it “Willie-Pete” in grunt lingo, using what sounds like a nickname for a cheap bottle of bingo in unintended irony, to identify a terrifying chemical weapon correctly named “white phosphorus” being used by one of the combatant sides in Iraq.

The irony goes deeper, much deeper, for it is the army of the United States of America, waging war in Iraq against the resistance ostensibly because their Commander-in-Chief feared Saddam Hussein would use chemical weapons, which now has admitted before the world that it has employed “Willie-Pete” against the insurgents.

It was said by one spokesperson in defence of its use, that there is no pleasant way to die in battle, so that it makes little difference what method is employed.

That is true, of course, but some ways are far more painful and unpleasant than others, unnecessarily so, and being burned to death by white phosphorous is one of them.

That is why the testimony of returned GIs about the use of white phosphorous is so disturbing, and the comments of GIs (“Fry the bastards!”) during the battle for Fallujah so compelling. For what we hear are the voices of men reduced to the barbaric levels of the weapon they are enthusiastically using, as though their victims were some sort of sub-human species.

But now there is something else astir in the United States of America and “Willie-Pete” has become to Iraq what napalm became to Vietnam — a flashpoint illuminating the savagery of what is taking place under the guise of “bringing democracy to Iraq.” Remember that unforgettable picture of the naked Vietnamese child running down the road with the flesh napalmed off her body. It haunts me still, after all these years.

It is true that the resistance fighters have been no less dreadful in their relentless slaughter of their own people, as well as Americans caught in their fire.

But here’s the moral dilemma: What does it profit the United States of America to descend to the same unspeakable level of savagery, killing civilians as well as their targets, with the chemical weapons they piously condemned, and went to war to eradicate?

The American people know. They have turned in increasing numbers on their President and their Vice-President and all their works. Those two dillies, in between speeches justifying the use of torture on prisoners and denying them the protection of the Geneva Conventions, have excoriated anyone who differs with them, including a Vietnam veteran with many years in Congress, terming any and all who oppose them traitors and cowards who give comfort to the enemy.

This from an administration headed by a President and filled with people who dodged and evaded service to their country to avoid the sights and sounds and smells of death and injury on the field of battle. They send others to die in their place.

Their demagogic persecution of Democrat John P. Murtha, a 30-year army veteran with a chestful of Purple Hearts and other medals, brings to mind the famous statement by the mild mannered Boston lawyer Joseph Welch. It was he who finally brought Senator Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror to heel when he said to the Senator during a televised hearing : “Until this moment Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency?”

Clearly, the words reverberate now through the halls of history.

Mr. Welch was a man of great courage. So is Congressional Representative from Ohio, John P. Murtha. His public denunciation of his Commander-in-Chief’s war is an act of no less courage. As such, it is as well, a turning point — a tipping point — in the mobilization of public opinion against the war in Iraq.

Political scientist John Mueller, writing in the magazine Foreign Affairs says: âe¦ “if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse the decline.”

The truth to that observation can be found in the reckless desperation of the outbursts of Mr. Bush and his henchmen.

The war in Iraq is lost, just as the Vietnam War was lost long before the Americans pulled out. It is now just a question of how that will happen in Iraq, and when.

There will be tragic consequences no matter what.

The President and his war advisers chose to wrap the “war on terrorism” launchedby the dreadful terrorist act of 9/11, around the decision to wage war on Saddam Hussein, by claiming that Saddam’s Iraq was a spawning ground for world terrorism. It was not, of course. There was only the faked linkage, as well as the faked danger of weapons of mass destruction under construction in Iraq, given as excuses for invasion.

It is now. The terrorists arrived with the Americans in a classic case of cause and effect. The world will reap that deadly harvest of death and maiming in ways we cannot now imagine.

There is another, just as awful future to contemplate for the people of Iraq — a full blown civil war and an unsettling instability for years to come in the Middle East. This is the inevitable result of removing a despotic strongman who cobbled together what never was a country, and used the glue of dictatorship to compel obeisance from the disparate parts.

We have seen it before, and in recent history. Remember the country known as Yugoslavia? It was the invention of strongman Tito, a forced union of Croats, Serbs and Muslims. Yugoslavia began disassembling into its disparate parts the day that Tito died.

Modern day Iraq is really three tribal constituencies: Kurds in the north; the minority Sunni Muslims in their central triangle; and the majority population of Shiite Muslims controlling the oil rich southern part of the country. The three elements of the population despise each other. It is not a question of what will happen if the Americans leave, it is only a question of when the differing ethnic and religious populations can get at each others’ throats.

Republican apologists like the writer David Brooks argue that the American presence is the only buffer between the competing groups, and that is why the Americans must stay in Iraq, to keep them at a distance. Except that is not working, as the suicide bombings attest every day.

The sectarian civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites is well-underway. The corpses and maimed bodies littering the landscape in Iraq offer the proof of that. The Kurds bide their time and wait for the Americans to leave before they declare their independence.

There can be no victory for George W. Bush in Iraq. The war is unwinnable by whatever measure might be applied to the traditional concept of “victory” or “success” — the surrender of the enemy, or the killing of all the enemies — whichever comes first. Neither can happen in Iraq. The “terrorists” are like Medusa’s children — kill one and another is spawned to take its place.

Mr. Bush can find no ultimate rationalization for the death and maiming of thousands of his own people and the even greater toll of men women and children of Iraq. There never will be victory for the American President in Iraq, only the shame of history.

History will write of the war in Iraq as one of the great human tragedies of this or any other time; an emanation of men gone mad with their lust for power in their attempt to impose an Imperial America on the world.

Optimists like Mr. Brooks, and the propaganda machine of the Bush administration pump out verbal sewage about the status of the training of Iraqi troops, with Mr. Brooks writing in the New York Times that… “the training of Iraqi troops is going well” and quoting a retired general with the cheery message that … “the Iraqi troops are becoming effective fighters and their morale is high.”

Mr. Brooks speaks for the Bush administration when he describes Mr. Murtha’s proposal for immediate withdrawal of American troops as “incomprehensible.”

But ABC News reports that “only about 700 Iraqi troops” can fight on their own; another 27,000 more could take a lead combat role only with strong American support while more than 200,000 under training are essentially useless in the field.

Mr. Murtha is correct in his essential premise that the war is lost, and the United States of America might as well admit it.

The growing majority of the American people know this to be true. It’s a pity their leaders will not listen to their chorus of opposition to a war that never should have been and never can be won.

But for now the litany of useless deaths and maiming will continue.