John Kerry campaigned using the slogan, "help is on the way." George W. Bush's first act now that he's got his mandate was to launch a major ground assault on Falluja in Iraq, following a few months of intensive aerial bombardment. This has evidently been planned quite a while, but they delayed launching it until the votes had been counted and the voters safely put back to sleep. A more revealing campaign slogan for Bush would be, "hell is on the way."

I'm not aware of Kerry commenting on the siege of Fallujah, although I have to admit that I haven't been paying a lot of attention to him, including his concession speech. Had Kerry won the election he presumably would have something to say, as the assault on Falluja would have made his task of coming up with a somewhat positive resolution even harder than it is. But all I know about Kerry's concession speech is that it was lauded as gracious, which probably means he didn't take the opportunity to scold the electorate by pointing out that "help is not on the way." That is, of course, the difference between a politician trying to make nice and a leader who realizes how much was at stake, and now how much has been lost, in this election. Kerry may be a dedicated public servant, and he may have laudable personal principles, but he's not a guy who's going to fight for once you're down.

What's going on in Falluja right now is that the U.S. is destroying a city that before the war was home to some 300,000 people. Presumably by now most of those people have done what most sane people do when besieged by overwhelming firepower: they've abandoned their homes and become refugees. Those refugees may escape with their lives, but you can't argue that they aren't victims. Even the few whose houses won't be damaged and whose possessions won't be looted will have been scarred by this assault. Of course, many will suffer extensive property damage, and thousands will die; thousands and thousands more will be wounded. Some of the dead will have actually fought the Americans, which would qualify them as what we now call "anti-Iraqi forces" -- enemies of the friendly Iraqis we brought freedom to by wrecking their country. And a few may even be foreign jihadists.

The obvious question nobody asks is what possible good could come out of an American military victory here. In particular, how does it help to legitimize U.N.-sponsored elections if we destroy a city, driving out or killing its residents, and leaving what's left under military occupation? Iraq's Sunni Arab minority already had plenty of reason to think that the U.S. was intent on trampling on their rights. Shouldn't we be working at bringing them into the electoral process? Such an effort seems to have worked with Muqtada al-Sadr, who disbanded his militia in order to take part in the elections. The resistance and those pesky foreign jihadists aren't likely to sign off so easily, but what about a cease fire, which would let the resistance continue to occupy cities like Falluja but would allow the U.N. access to run the elections? That the U.S. has never offered any such thing suggests that the resistance is right about the elections: that their purpose is to not to reflect the desires of the Iraqi people but to continue the American occupation. One thing that makes it hard to dispel this suspicion is that George W. Bush's own idea of an election doesn't involve any more lofty idea that that it's something Karl Rove can win for him. Also that the U.S. made no attempt to set up elections at any time in the first 18 months of the occupation. The siege and future occupation of Falluja drives not only the active resistance but also most of the Sunni population out of the potential electorate, thereby even further delegitimizing the results. In other words, it ensures that whoever wins the elections will be faced, as we are now, with a recalcitrant resistance movement and a growing civil war.

But isn't that the purpose? If Iraq is a free democracy, what do they need us for? The obvious answer is to help them fight the foreign jihadists out to destroy their democracy. What we're doing in Falluja is stoking the fire that drives civil war, in the hope that our Iraqis will buy the idea that they need us to stave off a return of Saddamist tyranny -- that regardless of how much they resent us they recognize that we're the only hope they have. It's a gamble, but by cranking up the violence our man in Baghdad, Iyad Allawi, has an excuse to impose martial law -- all the better to stuff your ballot box, my dear. Of course, other interpretations may come into play. A big part of last spring's siege of Falluja was base revenge, and that hasn't been forgotten. This may also be viewed as an object lesson: both that the withdrawal last time was a compromise that won't be repeated, and that the cost of resistance is overwhelming destruction. It is also likely that the latter point is meant as much to impress Syria and Iran as the Iraqi resistance.

Which leads us to one more big question, which is why is George W. Bush willing to pay so much just to hold onto an increasingly impoverished and dilapidated Iraq? Presumably we're talking about the control of the Middle East and its critical oil supplies. I don't understand how that works, but then virtually everything that Bush does seems destined to fail. Thus far he's managed to screw up everything he's touched and still get away scot free. Chalk him up for yet another war crime in Falluja, and pray he has to pay the piper soon.