An instructive firefight.

George Bush may never be able to awaken from his Iraq nightmare, as the insurgents continue to disrupt the occupation and kill U.S. and allied personnel. Bush is in a lose-lose situation.

Take the firefight in Samara, Iraq, on November 30.

We don't know for sure how many insurgents the U.S. soldiers killed, but we do know they killed at least a few civilians, including one seventy-one-year-old Shiite Iranian, who was on a pilgrimage to a mosque, and a woman who worked at a pharmaceutical factory.

U.S. soldiers managed to wound other civilians. The London Independent interviewed a little boy with bullet holes in both his legs. He was shot outside a mosque, where he was standing with his dad, who was killed.

The U.S. military seems to think the raid was a great success.

"They attacked, and they were killed," said General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I think it will be instructive to them."

But some Iraqi civilians are learning a different lesson. They are learning to hate their occupiers.

"If I had a gun, I would have attacked the Americans myself," one shopkeeper told The New York Times. The shopkeeper said he saw U.S. soldiers kill two Iraqi civilians.

Bush and the Joint Chiefs can't seem to understand the essential dynamic of this insurgency. The more brutally the U.S. tries to crush the insurgency, the more outraged Iraq's citizens will become, and the more recruits the insurgency will find.

That is the instructive lesson of Samarra.

Meanwhile, Bush's claim that he wants to install democracy in Iraq gets more difficult to sustain by the day.

The Bush Administration fears that a direct election would bring to power a Shiite whom Washington might not be able to push around. That leader could align with Iran, or renationalize industries, or order the U.S. troops out. And Bush wants none of that. So he ordered Paul Bremer to construct an elaborate process for picking electors around the country, a process Bremer would control.

Bush's excuse for not holding direct elections was transparent. The Administration said there wasn't a decent census yet of Iraq's voting population and there couldn't be one anytime soon. When it turned out the Iraqi Ministry of Planning actually drew up a plan for a thorough census that could be completed by September 1, Bremer pooh-poohed it.

"Rushing into a census in this time frame with the security environment that we have would not give the result that people want," said Charles Heatley, spokesman for the U.S. occupation.

Which people is he referring to? Bush and Bremer?

"Simply put, if you move too fast, the wrong people get elected," Noah Feldman, a former adviser to Bremer, told The New York Times.

Ah, yes. We're for democracy. Just not yet. Not until we've rigged the outcome.

On December 1, at the National Assembly in Paris, Howard Zinn received the Prize of the Friends of Le Monde Diplomatique. Judged by Nobel Prize-winners Dario Fo and Jose Saramago, filmmaker Costa Gavras, and writer Jose Luis Sampedro, the award highlights intellectual innovation and is designed to "create a breach in the dominant thought." Zinn, who has an essay for us this month, won the prize for his People's History of the United States. Congratulations, Howard!