"Blame," wrote novelist Dalton Trumbo, "is for God and little children." I have always believed these to be good and wise words to live by. But today, sitting at my desk, writing these words, I am struggling with the desire to blame and the desire to punish.

Why? Because of a story.

It begins in the ruins of human civilization's first home, a third-hand tale that comes from a good neighbor of a family living there, a neighbor who told it to a reporter, who wrote it for a newspaper, where I read it. And though I know well that memory fails and details get changed and twisted with each retelling, I know, too, that the blood and the bodies in this story were real.

The story?

In a small town along the Euphrates River, in a modest house like so many other houses, a father pleads with weary-eyed soldiers for his life and for his family. "I am good," the father says. "I am a friend," he cries. Next to him, the mother cries, too, perhaps pleading for sanity and calm. Maybe she pleads for her husband, or pleads for their children, their five girls, ages fourteen, ten, five, three, and one.

The children are standing or sitting there, too, pleading, crying. In the confusion, someone is shouting and others are screaming. And for some reason, the weary-eyed soldiers, already angry, become further agitated. Perhaps the father's hands move too quickly. Perhaps the wife falls to her knees. Or perhaps, without thinking, one of the girls reaches out to the floor for the youngest child, whose eyes and nose are wet with tears. Who knows? Does it matter? In the end, something seemingly innocuous made the shooting start. In a momentary explosion of sound and flashes, the American soldiers murder them all. Murder the father. Murder the mother. Murder the children.

When they see what they have done, the weary-eyed soldiers leave the house and move to other houses where they murder again. And again. They murder the elderly. They murder the infirmed. They murder more children.

And finally, after hours have passed, when enough children have been murdered to satisfy their anger, the weary-eyed soldiers go away.

Then, many months after the event, I read this story. And I can't stop thinking about the children, about the little girls, pleading for their lives as American soldiers shoot them.

And despite those words of Dalton Trumbo, I have to be honest: I am angry. I want to blame those soldiers. I want to punish them.

And I want to blame and punish those who exploded the roadside bomb that shredded to pulp the young soldier whose death may have triggered this day's madness along the Euphrates River.

And I want to blame and punish the craven right-wing apologists who soft peddle this calculated horror, saying the Marines simply "snapped" after one of their own was killed.

And I want to blame and punish the morally bankrupt American military officers who calculatingly covered up this massacre - and no doubt other massacres - as though it were just a standard practice of war.

And I want to blame and punish the automaton bureaucrats responsible for the Robert McNamara-style remuneration for the dead - $2,500 American dollars for every man, woman, and child murdered - paid in full to each grieving family.

And I want to blame and punish the vile speechwriter who, smiling at his or her clever words, offered the President of the United States the cold-comfort phrase of more "Core Values Training" to be given to all U.S. soldiers as an appropriate response to the murder of children. (What can it possibly say about U.S. troops if they have to be taught or reminded not to kill children?)

And I want to blame the criminally incompetent President of the United States who, with no understanding of irony, audaciously says that those responsible for the Haditha murders should be punished. (Who started this war without cause? Who ordered the 'Shock and Awe' death from above? Who, after all, is the Commander-in-Chief?)

With tears welling in my eyes, and rage boiling in my heart, I want to blame and punish them all.

But I can't, because I am reminded of other words, also good and wise: "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" - Christ's admonition about blame and punishment.

Consider: didn't we, twice, elect this president? Didn't we, for so long, overwhelmingly support this war? Didn't we, with our yellow-ribbon stickers, "proudly" support these troops? Didn't we, by ignoring the endless rush of executive-branch crimes, refuse to impeach this president for lying and for stealing and for cheating the American people? And didn't we, by remaining silent and electing war-mad politicians, refuse to bring home our troops?

I ask myself: honestly, who is to blame for the murder of those children? Who, among us, is without sin?

I remember again Dalton Trumbo's words: "Blame is for God and little children."

And I think: as we awake to the dark truth about our war with Iraq; and as we begin, honestly, to survey the damage that we, as Americans, have done there and around the world; and as we solemnly bury the dead and heal the wounds that our own hands have created, is it not time to put down our stones, to put away our blame, and to learn the sobering lessons from our folly?

Let's hope so.

Steven Laffoley (stevenlaffoley@yahoo.ca) is an American writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of "Mr. Bush, Angus and Me: Notes of An American-Canadian in the Age of Unreason."