By Alexander Zaitchik

TIME TO GO Just when you think it can't get any worse in Iraq, something happens to make you wonder anew if the whole thing isn't being scripted by al Qaeda's secret screenwriting compound in Peshawar. Maybe the conspiracy heads are right. Maybe U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies are providing bin Laden and his associates not only with funding and training, but also access to the best in-house minds at DreamWorks.

How else to make sense of what happened on Sunday? A group of Iraqis had gathered around the burning remains of a Bradley fighting vehicle in downtown Baghdad, including a Palestinian television correspondent for the Al-Arabiya network named Mazen al-Tumeizi. U.S. helicopters then opened machine-gun fire on the crowd, wounding dozens and killing al-Tumeizi while he was on the air. As if Al-Arabiya's millions of viewers needed to be reminded of another country that uses Apache helicopters to rain death from above, the blood spilled on Haifa Street.

U.S. military spokesmen later said the crowd was firing at the helicopter, a claim the Washington Post disputes.

But does it even matter? The extent to which the Iraq war has become counterproductive in combating terrorism is difficult to fathom. The same day as al-Tumeizi's on-air murder, more than 100 Iraqis were killed in battles that raged across the country. More than 60 of these deaths came during an air strike in the northern city of Tal Afar, resulting in new strains with Turkey and the Kurds. Altogether, the weekend battles raised the average number of daily attacks on occupying forces, a trend likely to result in heavier U.S. reliance on air strikes to suppress the insurgency.

This increase of air strikes against urban targets will create a counterproductive strategic spiral that will mirror and acclerate the larger spiral of the Iraq project in general. Not only do air strikes contribute to innocent deaths and the sense that the Americans are afraid to engage the enemy, but U.S. intelligence will be even worse on the ground as a result, leading to yet more collateral damage.

All of this will contribute to an ongoing PR nightmare that few Americans could have imagined three years ago in the wake of 9/11, when the world genuinely mourned for us, and it seemed the tragedy might result in America learning a thing or two about cycles of death and destruction.

In Bush in Babylon, one of the most important books written about the war, Tariq Ali predicted early in the war that resistance would be fierce, thus necessitating a brutal occupation. He went so far as to prophesize a combination of "Guantanamo and Gaza" would be needed to control post-Saddam Iraq. If the revelations at Abu Ghraib confirmed the Guantanamo half, the events of this past weekend would appear to herald the full arrival of Gaza. All of which leads to the inescapable conclusion that it's high time to get out of there. Not only can things get much worse, it's pretty damn obvious they're about to. o