She was the kind of rare person the world cannot afford to lose: the bridge-builders between cultures and religions, the people who live to break down barriers, the people who believe life is about helping others less lucky than ourselves.

I have known many people like Margaret Hassan in Cambodia: brave Australians who worked to help the Cambodian people, in the dangerous years when the Khmer Rouge were kidnapping and murdering Cambodians and aid workers alike. I know at first hand the courage and integrity of such people.

I also grieve equally for the dead of Fallujah. The battle of Fallujah, now grinding to an ugly close after eight horrific days, showed conclusively that 10,000 US soldiers were sent into war with orders to suppress and destroy a city of 300,000 ordinary Iraqi people.

Thus the US-led military attack on Fallujah was a war crime, in that it was an attack on an undefended civilian city, for no legitimate and commensurate military purpose. The very fact of this attack . even if it had been conducted by honourable means . violated the laws of war.

In fact, the attack on Fallujah was not conducted by honourable means, but by particularly cruel and internationally illegal means. Weapons that have indiscriminate and uncontrollable effects on civilians, and particularly inhumane weapons - huge 4000 kg bombs, cluster bombs, phosphorus weapons that melt human flesh, city-block destroying missiles - were used freely. Wounded soldiers were shot dead on the ground in cold blood. Unarmed men trying to leave the city with their wives and children under a white flag were turned back into the burning city. Hospitals were invaded, closed down and their patients ordered out into the streets. Red Cross food and medical aid convoys were refused entry. People were shot dead trying to swim to safety across rivers. Whole streets of houses were flattened in pursuit of a single sniper.

So now we know the answer to the question the armchair strategists have been asking . how will the US Army conduct war in heavily-populated Iraqi cities? Answer . in exactly the same way as if there were no people there at all . by a ruthless military elimination of anyone that moves, and of every building that might shelter anyone that moves.

The horrors of this attack on the people of Fallujah, when the truth is known, will equal or surpass the horrors of the Wehrmacht.s destruction of Warsaw in 1944, or the Russian Army.s destruction of the Chechen capital, Grozny. This is as bad as it gets.

The US is thus manifestly at war on the people of Iraq, because it is determined to control the oil resources of the Muslim Middle East, and because control of the Iraqi oil heartland . if necessary by naked force - is seen as pivotal to that strategy.

Fallujah shows finally that this war is not about bringing democracy to the Iraqi people . that figleaf is now finally swept away. Both the Shia and the Sunni Iraqi people desperately want to exercise real democracy in their own country, but it is being denied to them by Washington . and Washington.s puppet leader Allawi is as cruel as was the former US puppet leader Saddam Hussein.

The fact that Allawi sanctioned the US attack on the people of Fallujah showed he is nothing more than a US figurehead . a man ready to betray the very lives of his own people.

There is one important symmetry, and one important asymmetry, in the deaths of Margaret Hassan and the deaths of who knows how many people in Fallujah this past week.

Both sets of killings are acts of barbarism and savagery . that is the undeniable symmetry.

The asymmetry . that the men who died taking up arms against the US invaders in Fallujah were defending their homes and their personal honour in their home city Fallujah. But the US soldiers who killed them killed under orders, as part of an invasion force sent in to suppress the city. To say . as Amnesty has naively and unhelpfully said . that there were "atrocities on both sides" in Fallujah , misses this essential point of difference.

We will hear many words of grief for Margaret Hassan in coming days. We will read a lot of moralising about the bestiality and cowardice of those who killed her.

I wish it could be balanced by some words to honour people like the Fallujah father who watched his young boy bleed to death in his arms in their home, after being hit by a piece of US shrapnel - a son whose life could have been saved if there were a working hospital to take him to, and if it had been possible to get there without being shot dead in the street by US troops. For Margaret Hassan, that boy.s life would have been worth as much as or more than her own life. But who mourns for him ?

I wish it could be balanced by some words of respect for the brave and hopelessly outgunned men who died as soldiers defending their homes in Fallujah against overwhelming firepower and troop numbers, but who are routinely reviled now in the media as worthless and treacherous enemies.

There are important policy consequences from the deaths of Margaret Hassan and the nameless dead of Fallujah this week, if only our politicians had the wit and moral courage to see them and act on them .

Australia should no longer have any presence . military, diplomatic, aid or commercial - in Iraq, until the US occupation ends and the puppet Allawi regime is replaced by a genuinely Iraqi government.

Because the Allawi Government has forfeited any legitimacy by sanctioning the US attack on its own people in Fallujah, it follows that there is no reason for any Australian diplomatic mission to be accredited to this government. What has happened in Fallujah this week calls for the suspension of all Australian Embassy operations in Iraq and the withdrawal of all Australian-based staff from Baghdad.

No matter how worthy their aid or humanitarian purpose, no Australian aid agency has any proper business to be in Iraq at this time. For two reasons at least; the security risks are unacceptably high - if Margaret Hassan can be executed by insurgents, no Westerner is safe in Iraq. And there is no way useful aid or reconstruction work can be done while the whole country is rising up against, or passively resisting, the US occupation. Australia.s reputation in the Islamic world can only suffer if we maintain a diplomatic or aid presence in Iraq in present circumstances

Similarly with Australian commercial activities in Iraq: the same personal security and wider policy arguments apply, calling for immediate withdrawal. .

And of course there should be no Australian military presence in Iraq either . either in war-fighting, war-planning, security guarding or training roles. (One very small piece of good news I read from Fallujah last week . that the same Iraqi soldiers and police trained by the Australians over the past year were reported to be abandoning their weapons and throwing away their uniforms, refusing to take part in killing their fellow Iraqis in Fallujah. Only Kurdish brigades fought in Fallujah with the US . no Shia, no Sunni. I do not regard this as cowardice . simply as an ethical choice made by the Iraqi soldiers and police concerned).

I wish Australians were all gone from Iraq by Christmas. I wish they were all gone tomorrow. I fear Australians will die in Iraq, as Margaret Hassan has died. But that is not the only reason I want my fellow Australians out of Iraq. We just should not be there now.

This commentary will certainly be attacked by critics as disloyal, and as giving comfort to a ruthless enemy who is trying to kill our soldiers in Iraq. But if the enemy has now become the whole Iraqi people, surely the time has come to admit we should not be in Iraq at all, until the illegal US-led occupation is ended and peace is restored to that suffering country.

Here are some recent thoughts by Keysar Trad, an honourable Australian Muslim community leader whom I am proud to acknowledge as a friend. As I mourn for Margaret Hassan, I support his views:

"This war [on Fallujah] is wiping out a city. Its cost will haunt humanity from now to eternity."

"The US cannot succeed in Iraq by replacing one dictator with another who is at the very least, equally brutal".

"The US-appointed interim Iraqi government.s endorsement and participation in the bombing of Fallujah, brands it as a betrayer of its nation and people."

"There is a solution to the quagmire in Iraq. It starts with a full withdrawal of foreign troops, and then an appeal to the neighbours of Iraq, who share their culture and traditions, to work together with the Iraqi people to restore order to that great nation. This has worked with Lebanon. It can work again with Iraq."

"As free and fair-minded Australians, we don.t need to blindly acquiesce in coalition atrocities in Iraq. We have our conscience and our tradition of fairness and justice. This is the Australian ethos, and each and every Australian expects this ethos to be upheld."