Sometimes, the story will just speak for itself - no comment needed. Today's New York Times portrays one of the most horrendous days in the American occupation. The Invasion of Iraq, as the rest of the world calls it, is not going well for the Bush Administration, or for the rest of us. Bush the Younger will eventually go down in history as perhaps in the top 5 worst presidents.

This is very very sad.



FALLUJA, Iraq, March 31 — An enraged mob attacked four American contractors here today, shooting them to death, burning their vehicles, dragging their bodies through the downtown streets and then hanging the charred corpses from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

A State Department spokesman, Lou Fintor, confirming the nationalities today, said neither the names of the victims nor the name of the company for which they worked would be immediately released.

Meanwhile, less than 15 miles away, in the same area of the increasingly violent Sunni Triangle, five marines were killed in one of the deadliest roadside bomb incidents for coalition troops in weeks. The marines were traveling through a dusty village along a supply route when the explosion ripped into their vehicles.

The steadily deteriorating security situation in the Falluja area, west of Baghdad, has become so dangerous that no American soldiers or Iraqi security staff responded to the attack against the contractors.

There are a number of police stations in Falluja and a base of more than 4,000 marines nearby. But even while the two vehicles burned, sending plumes of inky smoke over the closed shops of the city, there were no ambulances, no fire engines and no security.

Instead, Falluja's streets were thick with men and boys and chaos.

Boys with scarves over their faces hurled bricks into the burning vehicles. A group of men dragged one of the smoldering corpses into the street and ripped it apart. Someone then tied a chunk of flesh to a rock and tossed it over a telephone wire.

"Viva mujahadeen!" shouted Said Khalaf, a taxi driver. "Long live the resistance!"

Nearby, a boy no older than 10 put his foot on the head of a body and said: "Where is Bush? Let him come here and see this!"

Many people in the crowd said they felt as if they had won an important battle. Others said they thought that the contractors, who were driving in four-wheel-drive trucks, were working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

"This is what these spies deserve," said Salam Aldulayme, a 28-year-old Falluja resident.

The attack on the American military vehicle occurred in Al Anbar province, a wellspring of resistance to occupation forces, said Sgt. James Oleen, a military spokesman in Baghdad. The military offered no further information on the incident.

Witnesses said the attack occurred in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Falluja, The Associated Press reported.

After the attack in Falluja, residents told The A.P. that the burned cars contained weapons and that some of the bodies were dressed in flak jackets. The A.P. television network showed one American passport near a body and a United States Department of Defense identification card belonging to another man.

The series of deadly attacks on American troops and foreign civilians in the Sunni Triangle area of central Iraq, particularly around Falluja, and a similar spate of attacks in the northern oil city of Mosul, have raised doubts about the cautiously optimistic appraisal of American progress in the war that has been common among United States generals since the beginning of the year.

Military officials have said that the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13 and documents seized with him had allowed them to penetrate the cell structure of that part of the insurgency that sought to restore a "Saddamist" or Baathist government to Iraq, with the Sunni minority once again dominating the majority Shiites.

American generals have said that these breakthroughs had given them the upper hand in the battle against Saddam loyalists and created the conditions for the American occupation authority to move forward with confidence to the planned handover of sovereignty under an interim government on June 30 and to an elected government in January 2006.

At the same time, the generals have been saying that their main focus in the conflict has shifted to Islamic terrorists who they believe to have been responsible for many suicide bombings and other attacks on the Iraqi police, civilians and foreigners. These attacks, they say, have effectively carried the Iraqi conflict into a new landscape that makes the fighting here part of the worldwide war on terrorism.

But today's events at Falluja indicate that the war may not have changed as much as the generals have suggested.