Pssst. Wanna see some dirty pictures? Got a whole bunch of ‘em here.

Here’s one of a Marine shooting and killing an unarmed Iraqi in a mosque — great background too, showing a squad of Marines entering the building in Fallujah and, upon seeing several gravely wounded Iraqis lying against a wall, one of them shoots the man in the head.

And, yes, here’s another one. It shows US soldiers, backed by loyal Iraqi troops, raiding the Abu Hanifa Mosque, after Friday prayers, setting off stun grenades, arresting dozens of worshippers, and leaving at least two dead. The Abu Hanifa Mosque just happens to be the most revered in Baghdad, where the burial site of an Arab scholar, who founded one of Islam’s most prominent schools of jurisprudence, is located.

Oh, I got more dirty pictures for you. Here’s one of American troops — who are famed since their days in Vietnam to “destroy a town in order to save it” — leaving Fallujah in ruins, declaring last weekend that the fight for the City of Mosques, which began on the night of Nov.8, was over and the place is now “liberated.”

Are you ready for another picture, down and dirty? It shows a crew of Fallujites burying their dead, also last Friday, bloated corpses that had been rotting in the streets, with dogs and cats eating away at them, and, according to Jackie Spinner, the Washington Post correspondent, with the smell of death “so overpowering that it was almost impossible to sense anything else.”

Ya, I got more. How about this one showing American Marines and soldiers, again trailed by their loyal Iraqi troops, heading up to the city of Mosul to wreak similar havoc on it, in pursuit of insurgents who, like all guerrilla fighters, wear no uniforms, have no headquarters, and don’t hang out in a central command complex where you can have their leadership sit across the table from you to sign a surrender agreement.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The US went to Iraq with the intention of disarming and deterring Saddam Hussein’s regime, and to pursue the benign goal of liberating the country and democratizing the Middle East.

Those of us who fell for the neocons’ con at the time failed to realize that lofty rhetoric always accompanies any imperial resort to force, any grand strategy by a big power to maintain a unipolar world in which it accepts no peer competitor, no state or coalition of states that could challenge it as a global leader, protector and enforcer.

That is why the Bush administration committed American forces to fight in Iraq, seeing no problem in running roughshod over international norms, and in dismissing the idea of subjecting the rule of force to the rule of law.

International consensus? Hot air. Ten to fifteen thousand Iraqi civilian dead already? Well, heck, as Gen. Westmoreland assessed the Vietnamese character back in 1968, “they don’t value life as we do.”

When you fight a guerrilla war you don’t judge the outcome of your confrontations with the enemy by the seizure, occupation and control of territory (“The assault on Fallujah has been very, very successful,” said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), but by how your operations impact on the hearts and minds of the population.

During the Tet offensive in Vietnam, as a case in point, Viet Cong forces were decimated by American troops, but by mounting a countrywide assault and humiliating Americans by brazenly attacking the compound of the American Embassy in Saigon, they turned public opinion in the US against the war. At the time, even that war’s most ardent supporters, including Time magazine (yes, that publication too), turned against it. The Americans may have won the battle, but in the end that victory amounted to naught, since the Vietnamese won the war. Americans in Iraq appear poised to win military victory after military victory against the insurgents (who in classical guerrilla tactics retreat when they are attacked and attack when the enemy retreats) but to fail in their goal of convincing ordinary Iraqis that the American occupation’s goal is to make their country safe for democracy.

No question about it: The US military is the mightiest, best trained, best equipped in history, and they have won every major confrontation, and will win every projected major confrontation in the future, against Iraqi insurgents.

But winning military battles against insurgents is not, in a dialectical sense, a victory. To truly win here is to deprive these insurgents of popular support among the mass of Iraqis, to convince these people that the US is genuinely there to “rebuild” their country and introduce it to “American-style democracy.” And it is not altogether clear that Americans have so far succeeded in this endeavor.

The fact that US troops have had to fight so fiercely inside a major Iraqi city like Fallujah (and after taking it, regroup inside the Khulafah Rashid mosque, with their boots on), 18 months after “liberation,” attests to how pathetically Washington’s policy in that region has failed, or is teetering on failure.

Not only will the spectacle of what happened in Fallujah increase Iraqis’ resentment of the occupation, it will augment the ranks of the insurgents — insurgents who were not, at any rate, humbled or cowed by their defeat in or retreat from the city, since even while the battle raged there, they were able to strike in other parts of the country, including Baghdad itself.

Moreover, it will persuade these ordinary Iraqi people that the unelected Iyad Allawi is in the end an American creation or stooge, doing Washington’s bidding.

If the US has any sense, if it has learned from history, it would follow the advice given it by one astute legislator on the Hill almost a decade before the war in Vietnam ended in 1975.

Quit. Declare victory and get out.

One suspects that, with the exception of a few diehards, no one in government today believes that the US, as it continues to schlep around in Iraq, can turn the country into a stable democracy, or that it has a well-defined exit plan other than sponsoring elections in January then asking the duly elected government in Baghdad to order Americans out. That way Washington can claim, well, heck, we did our best, so don’t blame us, since we are being kicked out by a legitimate Iraqi leadership.

But of course Washington does not have — and where it does, will not exercise — this option. It cannot, very simply, allow the emergence of a failed state, probably embroiled in civil war, in the heartland of the oil-producing Middle East. In fact, early this week, senior US military commanders in Iraq, citing tenacious resistance, said that it is increasingly likely they will need, and ultimately get, a further increase in combat forces to put down the insurgency.

The US not only soldiers on, but is now looking for new wars to wage in our part of the world.

Last week, administration officials were talking about another Middle Eastern country with weapons of mass destruction, a country that is a menace to its neighbors, with connections to terrorism, that will have to be cut down to size, and dismissing as humbug diplomatic efforts by Europeans to defuse the crisis, while the Secretary of State sent out ominous warnings to the offending country.

Sounds familiar, right. This time the offending country is Iran. Will George Bush rush the US into another unnecessary war? Stay tuned for another episode of America’s grand imperial strategy, its “overreach” followed by, as American declinist scholars would put it, “decline” then “collapse.”