Who concoted this Fallujah policy? Why the empty threats? Why the return to Iraqi security which allowed the guerillas and others to fester and grow in Iraq after the 82nd Airborne pulled out last year?

Is this the Marine General’s best plan? Or Bremer’s? Or Rumsfeld and Bush? This seems to me the worst possible solution: Empty threats, an Iraqi security force that will almost certainly not deliver and may even aid insurgents, and still no turnover of those responsible for the deaths of 4 American contractors.

And right after the deal to pull out of Fallujah, we began bombing it. Can anyone make sense of this?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20040429/ts_nm/iraq_falluja_strikes_dc

psych-ops??

Maybe it’s a smoke screen in hopes of flushing out Al-Sadr, so we can kill or capture him and his “army”. I can’t believe Bush would risk the horrible PR here if he let that murderer and his guerillas go free. He is already in trouble, in my opinion, with his conservative base. Why risk losing more votes?

Giving Al-Sadr and the Shiites in Najef a victory (by our pulling back) is insanity. It will only make them more determined. What we SHOULD be doing is going after the enemy’s FAMILIES, arresting them. That is a tactic that was used, I believe against the Taliban or somewhere else in the Middle East with some success. Trouble is, our human intel is still very poor in Iraq. We need lots of moles.

Al-Sadr’s in Najaf, not Fallujah. What I’m reading is that the army is slowly tightening the ring around Najaf. They’ve moved into the abandoned Spanish base 3 miles from the main mosque and have set up checkpoints and patrols. Eventually, they’ll be on his doorstep without giving him an excuse to shoot first.

The Fallujah strategy makes less sense. The Iraqi general they tapped is Salah Aboud, former aide to Chemical Ali. The former regime elements in Fallujah may accept him, but that’s it. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni forces won’t be impressed. The foreign fighters won’t either. And if the rumors are true and Shia fighters from the south have been infiltrating the city, they’re more likely than anyone to start shooting at his men.

As far as going after families, that can backfire. One of our guys in Baghdad did a puff piece recently on a resistance fighter.

http://blog.newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches/archives/000270.html

The fighter’s claim was that he joined the resistance because the Americans gang-raped his sister in front of him in Abu Ghraib prison. Now, I don’t believe this for a minute — it doesn’t pass the smell test. Gang-rape of family members was a common practice in Saddam’s prisons. Considerably less so in American ones. We’ve been collecting victim statements from prisoners coming out of Abu Ghraib for a year. We’ve never once heard that one. The point is that he believes it’s effective motivating propaganda for other Iraqis. Family honor and all that.

Didn’t someone say that some of Saddam’s guards had (presumably fake or else stolen) American uniforms, and that they would shoot innocent civilians in order to turn people against the Americans?
This could explain the rape story; someone who wanted to recruit people to the resistance dressed like an American and raped the person’s sister (presumably masked so that he would not be identifiable as an Arab).

He says it happened inside Abu Ghraib prison so I wouldn’t take Baathists in American uniforms as an explanation. My guess is he’s recycling a common pre-war prison horror story.

I hadn’t heard that one about Baathists in American uniforms. Is it on the net anywhere? I did hear one about 4 Al Qaeda fighters wearing American uniforms, carrying M-16s and drinking Snapple who walked right up to the main gate of an American base in Afghanistan.

By the way, Al Jazeera says the Iraqi general is Jasim Muhammad Salah, formerly of the Republican Guard, not Salah Aboud, and that he got an enthusiastic reception in Fallujah.

I find the whole business totally incomprehensible, though I have been unable to understand any aspect of our occupation policy from the start. As someone familiar with the Vietnam story, I would caution against comparing our policies in Iraq with those of forty years ago in Southeast Asia. Next to this stuff, LBJ is beginning to look like a model war President.
Re David Levin’s comment: Offhand, I can’t think of any evidence that the man in the White House cares about what his “conservative base” thinks or wants!

Mr. Levine writes:

“I find the whole business totally incomprehensible, though I have been unable to understand any aspect of our occupation policy from the start.”

My feelings exactly. I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Mr. Auster writes:

“an Iraqi security force that will almost certainly not deliver and may even aid insurgents”

“May aid the insurgents”? Would you believe they *are* the insurgents themselves? According to AP, the Marines are taking the same people who were shooting at them last week and putting them on the payroll.

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=national&story_id=043004a1_iraq_fallujahforc

Maybe it’s impolitic to say so now, but if we wanted Iraq run by the Baathists, we could have had that for nothing.

This is too awful. But Mr. Hechtman’s point would apply, even if we hadn’t included our former enemies in this new force. Since we’re not going into Fallujah to clean out the insurgents there, why did we start the siege in the first place and make all those threats? Are our leaders so dumb that they have forgotten that you don’t make threats unless you’re prepared to act on them?

Meanwhile, we still don’t have a government answering questions, explaining what they’re doing. We’re left trying to figure out things from these bits and pieces in the press.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If Bush faced a half-decent opponent, even a quarter-decent opponent, even a one-eighth decent opponent, he’d be in serious trouble with his re-election. But he doesn’t, so he’s not.

My apololies to Mr. Hechtman—I left out in my earlier post were the words “in Najaf”, when I referred to Al-Sadr. What I was referring to was backing off from Fallujah and thus giving his followers there and Saddam’s henchmen a victory.

Mr. Levine’s (Alan’s) remark “I can’t think of any evidence that (Bush) cares about what his “conservativw base thinks or wants” to my is well taken. With the exception of going to war in Iraq (which some conservatives of course favored), he hasn’t done much to reel us back in.

I can’t help wondering if what monster we’ve created/are creating/have helped create in Fallujah and Najaf and elsewhere is not worse than “the Frankenstein monster” we captured! If we come out of Iraq with Saddam’s generals and henchman running the show, it will appear that we wasted a lot of our boys’ lives and a lot of money on a completely failed policy. Now I’m beginning to sound a lot like John Kerry and I don’t like it.

I fear Mr. Auster is correct. A half-decent opponent is unacceptable to our country, if I may be so bold. Russia, a country of extremely brave and patriotic people, is having an inexplicably difficult time with Chechnia. What is our fate in Iraq? Our excellent volunteer army seems stretched to its limit—see the unprecedented use of our reserves. (See, for Heavens sake, our minutemen. I assume our success is based on our populous and technological prowess.)

The blood and guts of Iwo Jima might be unacceptable to our country. At Iwo Jima (which the brilliant nitwit Jimmy Carter gratuitously gave back to the unrepentant Japanese) thousands of Marines died. My daddy, a U.S. Marine Corporal, told me how his Lieutenant, at Iwo Jima, folded his face back on, never to be seen again. My brother’s Vietnam experiences are no less awful.

Mr. Murgos wrote:

“Russia, a country of extremely brave and patriotic people, is having an inexplicably difficult time with Chechnia. What is our fate in Iraq?”

Current Russian army is rather sub-par. Still, even at their best they would have problems just the same.

1. Historically it is very difficult for a non-Muslim power to occupy a Muslim country.

2. Russians cannot be as brutal as Stalin was. The result: kids and women they spare will grow up to fight them.

3. Russians don’t have money to bribe Chechens and help develop their economy.

Some in the antiwar crowd have brought up a possible reason for our strange behavior in Fallujah - we are having trouble getting convoys through to our troops and they are low on supplies.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P847_0_1_0

What is so puzzling, boys. Isn’t this exactly what the Pentagon has porposed; to put an ‘Iraqi’ face on it?The second shift is moving in and the first shift is out of there!

Excuse me for quoting from Andrew Sullivan’s website, but I hadn’t thought about Fallujah and Iraq for a couple of days and, coming from a war-supporter like Sullivan, this is a very tough summing up of the situation. What’s shaping up is a picture of utter disarray and disaster in our Iraq policy.

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_05_02_dish_archive.html#108355942325776237

The article by Sullivan dovetails with several reports - including from US soldiers on the ground - that I’ve seen on FreeRepublic. The military people on the ground want to go in and pound the Fallujah militias into the ground - and the political leaders are holding them back - even to the point of having them do a de-facto retreat in the enemy’s face. It looks like the Bush administration’s underlying embrace of PC liberalism and multiculturalism has won out over common sense. As some here would say, this unprincipled exception (fighting the Jihadis) has fallen to the twisted beat of the Hegelian mambo. All of this illustrates and underlines the basic truth that has been brought forth on this site by Mr. Auster and others for more than a year now numerous times: We will not be able to defeat radical Islam as long as we continue to embrace liberalism. Fighting a PC, sensitivity-conscious war against the Jihadis is a disaster. Such an enterprise is doomed from the outset. I reluctantly supported Bush in this war despite my profound misgivings about his ability to face the truth about the enemy who attacked us. I am sad to say that my misgivings have been borne out. Once again, Bush proves to anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear that he is a liberal to the core. This is turning into a disaster. Bush’s liberalism is the problem. Is there really any difference with Kerry on this issue?