Opinion (James Carroll): Deathtrap

"WHO THE hell is shooting at us?" a US soldier yelled last week. His platoon was in a strife-torn part of Baghdad, teamed with an Iraqi Army unit. Gunfire was coming from all directions. "Who's shooting at us? Do we know who they are?"

My intention was to give readers of this column a break from the war. How many ways are there to say no? But then I read the vivid New York Times account of that soldier's dilemma, and it took over the field of my concentration: "Whether the gunfire was coming from Sunni or Shi'ite insurgents or militia fighters or some of the Iraqi soldiers who had disappeared into the Gotham-like cityscape, no one could say." The confused battle was a foretaste of what President Bush's new war strategy entails, with American forces caught between enflamed antagonists, with uncertain allies. In Washington, equivocating politicians look for the least horrible way forward, but in Iraq, US soldiers have been ordered into what increasingly shows itself as a deathtrap.

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