We had to destroy it to save it.

Matt Yglesias gets it about right.

Shocking!
American forces press into the heart of Falluja with mercifully few US casualties and discover "that many of the senior rebel leaders, including the Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had fled before the city was sealed off." Boy -- guerilla force flees rather than stand and be slaughtered by better-armed foe. Who could have predicted that except every goddamn person on the face of the earth. In a couple of days, things should settle down, the civilian population will return to their now-wrecked homes and places of business, no doubt extraordinarily grateful to the foreign army that got them wrecked. American forces will be reduced somewhat in number. US and Iraqi forces will come under sporadic insurgent attack. US and Iraqi forces will prove unable to provide day-to-day security to the local population. At best, Falluja will be like Baghdad. More likely, it will look like what Samarra looks like today within three or four weeks. Zarqawi will be somewhere else. Someday we'll capture him and it'll turn out that, just as with Saddam, capturing him doesn't actually solve any problems.