FROM HIGH over Iraq yesterday, President George Bush cast his Olympian eye over ancient Mesopotamia after praising the Americans in Qatar who had "managed" the war against Saddam Hussein. But far below him, on a dirty street corner in a dirty town called Fallujah that Mr Bush would prefer not to hear about, was a story of American blood and American power and American boots smashing down the front gates of Iraqi homes.
"She's got a gun," an American soldier shouted when he caught sight of a woman in her backyard holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle. "Put it down! Put the gun down!" he screamed at her. The soldiers were hot and tired and angry. They'd been up since 3am, ever since someone fired a grenade at a lorry-load of troops from the 101st Airborne. You could see why Mr Bush chose to avoid any triumphal visits to Iraq.
Survivors of the ambush were among the soldiers yesterday, remembering the early hours as only soldiers can. "They fired a grenade at a two-and- a-half ton truck full of the 101st Airborne and then straffed it with AK fire and then just disappeared into the night," one of them told me. "The guys were in a terrible state. One of our soldiers was dead with his brains hanging out of his head and his stomach hanging out, and there were eight others in the back shouting and pulling bits of shrapnel out of their legs."
Before dawn, the Americans came back to wash their comrades' blood off the street. Then they returned once more to deal with the people who live in this scruffy corner of the old Baathist city of Fallujah.
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"Please sir, you're taking my son away - he's done nothing wrong." There had been the crashing of another door down the street and I just caught sight of a young man in a brown shirt being driven away in a Humvee between two American MPs. An elderly man was pleading with a medical officer. "Why my son? Why my son?"
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There was some shooting a few hundred metres away and the soldiers ran for cover behind walls and gardens. Then a gate was booted open and a man in a grey dishdash came out and sat by the gatepost with his hands on his head and his family sitting on the porch beneath the bougainvillaea while the Americans went through their home. Another AK was produced - almost every family in Iraq has two or three guns. They were, for the most part, what we would call middle- class people, educated and with homes that might pass for villas in this run-down city with its broken munitions factories and its Baath party apparatus so deep that it's hard to find an official uncontaminated by the stain of Saddam.
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Yesterday, the Americans made a hundred more enemies among them. One young man told me that a few nights ago, gunmen had arrived at their homes and asked them to join a new resistance movement. "We turned them down," he said. "I don't know what I'd say if they came again." Perhaps the same questions were once asked of the men who opened fire and wounded two American soldiers outside a Baghdad bank yesterday.
In Fallujah, one of the US MPs turned to me as his search was called off. "The Third Infantry Division are coming in here to go through this place tomorrow," he said. It will be interesting to see what "going through" means. But remember the name Fallujah
FROM HIGH over Iraq yesterday, President George Bush cast his Olympian eye over ancient Mesopotamia after praising the Americans in Qatar who had "managed" the war against Saddam Hussein. But far below him, on a dirty street corner in a dirty town called Fallujah that Mr Bush would prefer not to hear about, was a story of American blood and American power and American boots smashing down the front gates of Iraqi homes. 
