Falluja Update

Following up on Ron's entry below, a couple of brief observations on the ongoing invasion of Falluja.

This is shaping up to be the first true example of "urban warfare" in this invasion. Many people feared that the initial attack on Baghdad would be like that, but the resistance melted away and it never came to pass - at least not on any massive scale. Fear of an urban warfare scenario is justified. We haven't seen anything like this in a long time, thankfully. In Vietnam and Korea there were a some instances of truly awful city fighting, but the lion's share was jungle warfare and combat in rural areas. To find the last bone chilling incident of this scenario, you need to go back to World War Two and the battle of Stalingrad. Look it up on the web sometime, if you're not familiar. Or better yet, there are still a handful of ancient, grizzled WW2 vets alive. If you can find one who was over there, they can tell you about "the horror of Stalingrad." The death toll was in the millions.

Fighting a large, determined force that is well settled into a city offers only two realistic options. You can go in with a high tech, "shock and awe" approach and flatten the city. This will cut down your losses significantly and make the taking of the area far simpler. Unfortunately, the US realized early on that flattening Falluja would be political poison and likely inflame Muslims across Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. That leaves us the second option: block by block, building by building clearing of the area by the boots on the ground. You don't need me to explain the dangers of this.

This could turn into the ugliest episode of this entire invasion very quickly, and it's easy to see why Bush would wait until after the election to launch such a plan. Whether you supported Bush's invasion of Iraq or not, now would be a good time to say a quick prayer for our troops. This isn't going to be pretty, and it's hard to picture what sort of "gains" we will get from a victory here. If the population of that city hates us as badly as they seem to, nothing will change once the troops leave except the population, which will consist of a lot less people who are a lot more angry.