The liberation and occupation of Iraq killed the sister of one of my best friends a few weeks ago, an Iraqi, not an American.

Should that make her death any less grievous to us, or alter the truth that it was an utterly needless death and, even more tragically, a useless death?

I shook hands with Abbas Mehdi and embraced him in a Minneapolis coffee shop not long after his sister's death. He is normally an energetic man, courtly and verbal, a college professor, 51. On this day he struggled with the courtesies, trying to gather the emotions that stirred him to write a newspaper article that revealed his despair and anger. We have been friends in Minneapolis since the Gulf War of 13 years ago, when he grieved for the future of Iraq. Then and now he has loathed Saddam Hussein since a few years after meeting him in the 1970s. Not long after leaving Iraq he was branded an enemy of the country by its dictator. Since the first days of the Gulf War he stood ready to organize an Iraqi opposition-in-exile. But he still dreaded and opposed an American-led invasion, fearing that it might destroy what it was trying to save.

None of the family Abbas left behind when he last saw Iraq 26 years ago was injured in the Gulf War. But a few weeks ago his sister died from injuries suffered in an accident on a barricaded street, unable to reach a hospital because of a roadblock, a casualty of a new war that fulfilled Abbas Mehdi's worst premonitions.

She was not killed in a bombing--not by insurgents, by Americans, terrorists or assailants unknown. She was killed by a delusion of the liberating power. Its scenario was this: The aftermath of its overwhelming sweep through the paper army of Saddam Hussein was going to be a few weeks of inconvenience for these millions of emancipated people, after which the oil would flow like water and pay for all of it and convert Iraq into the jewel of desert democracy.

There have been thousands of casualties like Abbas' sister. When we count the cost of the war, in our budget hagglings and in the rag-chewing that passes for debate on television, do we mourn the deaths of those innocents?

Abbas Mehdi is a sophisticated scholar who travels the world and knows most of its realities. He prizes his American citizenship, has acquired hundreds of friends here and has admired the values he sees here. But in the wake of his sister's death, distraught, he wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

"This is what Iraq's liberation looks like to me right now: A woman bleeding to death on a public highway, unable to get help because coalition forces have blocked the road while looking for insurgents. A large room in a hospital where corpses are laid at random on a dirty floor, some of them uncovered, with nothing to identify them, a scene of horror for those trying to find the bodies of their loved ones.

"The woman is my younger sister. She was involved in a car accident on the road betwen Najaf and Baghdad, traveling home after visiting my parents. When she finally (was driven to) the hospital in Baghdad after being stuck on the road for more than six hours, no one could do much for her...The hospital was overwhelmed and disorganized and the telephone lines were down. When my other sisters finally got to the hospital the staff didn't even know where her body was. They were directed to a large room full of corpses...

"Since the fall of Baghdad I have wanted desperately to go back to Iraq, to be with my family. No one could get through by telephone. I knew that bombs were falling on the places where they lived, but I had no way of knowing whether or not they were safe. But since then whenever I talk to them they yell at me, "don't come! It's not safe."

"I have been working for regime change in Iraq, hoping that Saddam Hussein would fall from power and that peace, democracy and stability would come to my country. Yet I opposed last year's invasion. I feared what might happen to the Iraqi people, being subjected to yet another war, weakened as they were by the last Gulf War and the war with Iran and by protracted economic sanctions. Now that scenario has played itself out...As I talk with the friends and relations who gathered for my sister's burial, what I hear most plainly is hopelessness, frustration and resignation."

Was there another way? There could have been. We never really gave it a chance. And it never got a chance because the American government cynically deceived its people and smothered the options. Those options included inspections that would have confirmed what we know now about the absence of nuclear and chemical arms in Iraq. They included unified action with the world community. What those options got was ridicule, sneers and the manipulation of public opinion in America. And by the millions we shouted, "Let's go to war. Stand Up For America."

And who will stand up now for Abbas' sister and the thousands of innocents like her?

And how seriously in America today do we mourn another silent casualty, which is Truth? Because we want to believe in the basic goodness of America and because we want to believe there is some semblance of truth to what our highest elected officers tell us, we have seen the truth corrupted and perverted in the last three years to the point where you now believe at your own risk. Words no longer mean what they seem to be saying. The outrageous tax cuts of the last three years are described as the savior of the economy, rescuing the middle class and working poor but NOT to enrich billionaire campaign contributors. Definitely not that. The economy is rosy, and what do you mean there are millions of people looking for jobs and millions more who have given up?

Well, yes, oil is flowing again in Iraq, from Kuwait, and sold to the government (read taxpayers) by Halliburton at exhorbitant prices. And yes, the war strategists said, some innocent people were going to die. It wasn't some. It was thousands. There are no official figures. The hospitals don't release them. Collateral damage, the strategists tell us, is going to happen. It has to happen, they insist, if you are going to start a war to make the American people safe from weapons of mass destruction. Isn't that the price of a just war, that innocent people will die by the thousands?

And if you're looking for positive results, didn't the organizers of the war win the mid-term American elections? It was, as Dick Cheney might say, their due.

So there aren't any weapons of mass destruction, the centerfold of their campaign. So there is no evidence of a connection between the former Iraq dictatorship and bin Laden or 9-11. With this outfit, there's always a Plan B to sucker the public, as we learned with the revelation last week that Iraq was involved in "program activities" that could be related to weapons of mass destruction. Program activities don't carry quite the wallop of WMD in promoting a war. But whatever seems saleable at the moment. This, after all, is war, which we're now told will more or less last forever.

We have now admitted that alone we can't handle the mounting restlessness and growing demands for democracy-now in Iraq. It threatens not only peace but Bush's numbers in the November election. Regime change sounded like a marvelous battle cry for the White House strategists but on the ground it's a walk in a snake pit. After all those months of deriding the United Nations as irrelevant, misguided and helpless, the government of the United States with a straight face is now asking the United Nations to rescue it from street riots in Iraq and the follies of our miscalculations.

But after all, Hussein was toppled and eventually captured. Doesn't that justify the killing of all of those innocents? And shouldn't that make America breathe a little easier?

The answers are no and no.

Only the most hopelessly indoctrinated of the Bush administration's true believers or beneficiaries can breathe easier today. With no political curbs available, in Congress or the high courts, this government is on a rampage of aimless spending, militant chest-pounding, whacky space visions, remaking of the world and promises that are incapable of being fulfilled or have already gone south. The polls increasingly reveal that growing numbers of Americans no longer seriously believe what they hear from Washington.

The trump card is always an appeal to the American people's conviction that what we are doing is right. God is usually summoned for a role somewhere in there. The bedrock for that appeal is that so often in our history, we HAVE done it right, we've been generous, our forces have fought well and heroically, and we have struggled through our divisions to make it a better world for our own and millions of others. It's the reason Americans are still respected around the world when it's government is not. But the troubling part is that a soldier killed in ambush in Iraq today is becoming one more statistic in the TV captions. The strategists refer passionately to "our brave American fighting men and women." Yes. But these same people are seldom seen at their funerals.

America is better than this.