American soldiers shot a 12-year-old boy in the streets of Mosul, Omar Musa Salih, who was standing on the roadside selling fruit juice.

Eyewitnesses on the scene said the boy had not thrown the grenade -- they had seen, with their own eyes, an older man lobbing it toward the Americans -- President Obama's Pentagon insisted that the dead boy was an "insurgent" who deserved to die. Their proof? He had a handful of Iraqi dinars -- less than $9 -- in his hand when they inspected his corpse. So that means he was in the pay of terrorists, you see.

This is an inevitable result of military occupations in hostile lands: all of the natives come to be seen as the enemy -- children, women, the old and weak included. All are deemed imminent and/or potential threats by the conquerors, and so, ultimately, every civilian death can be "justified" -- because there are no civilians. There are just Them -- and Us.

Why are we still in Iraq?