Caught in the crossfire.

Byline: The Register-Guard

It's easy to forgive the just-released Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena for lashing out at the U.S. soldiers who wounded her and killed the Italian agent largely responsible for her rescue in Baghdad.

Nicola Calipari died in Sgrena's arms last Friday night at an American checkpoint on the road to the Baghdad airport after U.S. troops fired on their vehicle. What awful anguish for the Italian journalist to have dodged almost certain death at the hands of her kidnappers only to face a fusillade of deadly gunfire from friendly soldiers within sight of the airport.

But Sgrena, a fierce opponent of the war who works for the communist newspaper Il Manifesto, was overwrought when she accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting her because the United States objected to methods used to secure her release. U.S. and British officials discourage ransom payments or negotiation with kidnappers, claiming that only encourages further hostage-taking.

To accuse U.S. forces of trying to assassinate citizens of a coalition partner - Italy has 3,000 troops in Iraq - is absurd, as White House press secretary Scott McClellan asserted Monday. If that were the objective, does anyone seriously believe Sgrena or any of the other surviving occupants of her car would be alive to hold press conferences today?

The friendly-fire incident underscores the corrosive impact that a gruesome campaign of suicide bombings, car bombings, roadside bombings and after-dark ambushes has had on exhausted, overburdened American soldiers. The sad fact is Sgrena was caught in a situation that has become so common that the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians by jumpy American soldiers are rarely reported in the media.

U.S. military vehicles in Iraq carry signs in Arabic warning civilians to keep at a distance or risk "deadly force." Soldiers are told to shoot first at a vehicle's engine block, but they're free to make split-second decisions about the level of force required for their protection. Jittery soldiers who've seen too many comrades killed and maimed have no tolerance for the advance of any vehicle that ignores the first warning. Many confused drivers and the occupants of their cars have been killed as a result of not knowing how to behave after receiving a warning.

The insurgency in Iraq is a guerrilla war on an urban battlefield, conducted with the most cynical camouflage possible: the everyday trappings of civilian life. No uniform differentiates friend from foe. For U.S. soldiers, the possibility of death is everywhere, on every street, more ominous for the ordinariness of its disguises: a bread truck, a manhole cover, a person with a shopping bag.

The toll has been horrific, especially for Iraqi civilians, by the insurgents' design. Every time a nervous U.S. soldier accidently kills an Iraqi who comes too close, the United States makes more bitter enemies, not just in Iraq, but throughout the Arab world.

The brutal truth of the U.S. occupation is that the battle for hearts and minds faces impossible odds under the current rules of engagement. Two images struggle for dominance in the public consciousness: One shows smiling Iraqis walking their children to a newly opened school. The other depicts a grieving parent standing beside a family car riddled with bullet holes, its seats soaked with blood. Which one would you remember?