Damned Fools

[posted by Callimachus]

This, if the popular reading of it is correct, is how you not only lose a war, but rot your honor in the process.

A U.S. soldier is captured; we're pretty sure we know who did it and where they are. We make a visible show of force to tighten the noose on the district that shelters them, and then the politicians pull the wires and the military stand down.

In a showdown for control of Baghdad, the Iraqi prime minister took orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, and instructed the U.S. military to withdraw from Sadr City. The American forces were trying both to stabilize the city but also to find a missing American serviceman. He is still missing.

Who won? Just look at the picture in the N.Y.T. story. And they know it. Sully is absolutely right here. This is shameful, humiliating, and far mor disrespectful of the real people who serve in the military than any John Kerry fumble-mouth play.

Stabilize the city and find the missing man? Probably impossible to do at the same time. Probably the problem with the whole operation. Petraeus months ago described it as trying to repair an airplane while it is in flight and under fire.

So when the contradiction forces you to the fork in the road, which way do you go? We took the Fallujah option, again. The worst of all options.

Never make battlefield-level military choices for political reasons.

Rather than sit down outside that neighborhood (and cordon it off as tight as Hillary Clinton's pursed lips) and say, "hand him over, tell us where he is, or suffer the consequences" and let the non-militia residents inside decide whose side they choose to be on, we sent a clear signal that the Americans don't really mean it.

Yes, babies would have gone hungry till it was settled. Yes Al-Jazeera and the BBC would have plastered the world with the images. But if you ever really want to stop the babies from going hungry, you have to break the power of the thuggery that runs that slum. You don't break something by negotiation. This was as good a chance as any we'll get.

That's the message: Americans don't really mean it. About anything. We won't back up even our most cherished principles if we can make them miserable enough. Even our honor. You don't think that counts for anything in the world, just because we jaded civilian suburbanites have outgrown such outmoded ideas? Think again.

Why would anyone in the Mideast who sees this man's fate (he's apparently Arab-American) take a risk to take our side? Anyone from Pervez Musharraf down to the curbside tea vendor in Najaf. Why should they?

What's just as bad is the message it sends to every person who puts on a uniform here in the U.S. "We won't abandon you ... unless we decide to. And try not to get your sorry ass captured in the month or so before an election, will you? It just causes us here at home no end of difficulties."

Sullivan's dudgeon has a hair trigger, but this one deserves everything it gets.

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq?

Victory Standard

In the first battle for Fallujah -- the one al-Jazeera undermined and the Bush administration foolishly called off for political reasons -- the Iraqi troops sent in to aid the U.S. Marines either mutinied or fled without firing a shot. Seven months later, in November 2004, the Marines went back to finish the job after a summer of chaos in Iraq caused by the insurgent magnet in Fallujah. This time, the two Iraqi battalions sent into battle fought well, and won praise from the Americans.

But their U.S. advisers were chagrined to see that, after the battle was won, the Iraqi soldiers changed into civilian clothes before going home. The risk of wearing a government uniform off-duty was too great. The insurgents might have been driven from Fallujah, but they still had the ability to inspire fear, and to find a man's family if they wanted to.

Bing West, in his splendid account of the Fallujah battles ("No True Glory"), considered this and came up with a benchmark for victory in Iraq:

The insurgents would be finished when an Iraqi soldier in uniform boarded a bus, got off at his local market, and walked home.

Now, that's not a military objective. It's a consequence of victory. But I've taken that as a standard. When you see that, then you'll know Iraq has turned out right. And certainly the Americans alone can never bring the country to that point. It has to be primarily an Iraqi act of will. It would require a political and a military aspect. And I don't intend it to mean the Iraqi soldiers lived free of intimidation by insurgents because the insurgents are running the country.

New Rules of War

[P]retending that the very specific charges that our troops used illegal chemical weapons against unarmed and innocent civilians is really all about the larger appropriateness of the battle for Fallujah is tantamount to accusing an innocent man of rape simply to raise the larger issue of sexual assault ....

Thank goodness for John Cole. Tough on stupid, no matter where it grows.

Here are three passages from the same page of Bing West's book on the battles for Fallujah. All refer to the spring 2004 offensive, the one that was called off (from the top, for political reasons) before it could finish the job:

Mortar attacks were common, day and night. Sometimes the shells dropped in with disturbing accuracy; other times they missed by a city block. Whenever a Cobra gunship flew over the city, it attracted a fusillade of machine gun fire and RPG rockets, a few detonating in the air, most exploding on roofs and streets.

...

The same message was broadcast from most minarets: America is bringing in Jews from Israel and stealing Iraq's oil. Women, take your children into the streets to aid the holy warriors. Bring them food, water and weapons. Do not fear death. It is your duty to protect Islam. After a few nights, when asked what the imams were yelling, the translators, bored by the repetition, simply said, "Stealing oil, bringing in Jews, protect Islam. The usual stuff. Same old, same old."

...

LtCol Olson and Capt Zembiec watched through binoculars as boys about ten years old lugged mortar shells across a road. On the roof with them were a Delta Force sniper with a .50 caliber rifle and a Marine corporal with the standard .308 sniper rifle. They sat in separate sandbagged shelters, peering out through mouse holes. Zembiec called them "cooperative carnivores." They waited all day, hoping that a grown-up insurgent would grow impatient and walk out to take one of the mortar shells from a boy. None did.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is a description of your enemy.

West is not writing a book of polemics. He doesn't feel compelled to justify the U.S. to a world that dislikes it. He's writing about a battle in progress. He's writing about "our" troops, and in his case, he means it. While al-Jazeera, embedded with the Fallujah insurgents, was unabashedly the "Arab network," the American networks were busy being citizens of the world. For Americans, where was the home-team media coverage of the Iraq war, unless you dug deep online for the free-lancers? As a result, most of us never got a clear view of our side, or who we were fighting.

In Fallujah we were fighting Al-Qaida in Iraq, alongside a gaggle of small-time Islamist groups, swelled by thousands of part-time jihadis, and potentially tens of thousands of angry citizens, each with an AK-47 in the house, who would join the fight if they thought the insurgents were winning, and melt back into being sullen civilians if the Marines surged.

This is the new face of war in a world where no nation yet -- with the possible exception of China -- dares face the United States in an open battlefield. As recently as the 1930s, the world contained 8 or 10 serious military powers that were capable of waging war against one another. The days when Canada and Italy were world-class military powers are over.

Yet the old rules of war, which still are invoked, evolved in that world. Those rules were devised by decent and fair men, and they were meant to protect innocent civilians and soldiers who had been rendered hors de combat. They were meant to apply to armies that fought in the open, in uniform, and to civilians who cowered in the cities and prayed the battles would pass them by.

As late as 1945, they still were in play. As the 12th Army Group pushed through Franconia and approached picturesque little German cities, the civilian leaders often sent out secret negotiators to arrange to surrender the town before it was stormed. Usually the German military had pulled back already, but it was a risky business. If they returned and found "collaborators," they tried them on the spot and hanged them.

If the American generals agreed, the town would open its gates to them. Many a gem of a medieval city was spared this way. But sometimes a few SS fanatics or Hitler Youth would sneak back into the town, hide in the attics, and open fire as the Americans approached then scurry out. The U.S. troops invariably pulled back then, and they called up the artillery and the bombers to flatten the town before moving on. The deal was off. How would Fallujah have fared under those rules?

The rules were not meant to bind the hands of American power, so that extremist ideologies, if they took refuge in populous cities, could always defeat the United States. The rules were not meant to level the playing field among combatants. They did not take into account the mass electronic media, and the difference between democracies, where a handful of media images can shake the national foundation, and tyrannies, where pictures of abused prisoners can easily be made to disappear before they are seen, along with anyone who owns them.

The U.S. Marines don't deliberately kill women and boys, even those actively aiding the enemy, because their warrior code forbids it. Yet any time a battle rages in a city, they will die. Who chose that battlefield? Who brought the non-combatants into the fight? Which side took infinitely greater care to avoid killing them?

It is absurd that the world now believes Americans used "chemical weapons" on Fallujah, thanks to the braying of people for whom all the evil in the world is summed up in the seven-letter word "America." Yet only the handful who will read "No True Glory" will know about the two snipers, the trained killers at the peak of their art, the modern-day Ajax and Teucer, watching the deadly weapons go up and wound their comrades all day long and never pulling the trigger.

After Vietnam, anti-war zealots spit on returning soldiers. Thanks to the Internet, today they don't have to wait for the troops to return to start spitting.

Fallujah Calling

Remember Fallujah? Three months ago, U.S. Marines waded into the warren of its streets and fought their toughest battle since Vietnam. They captured the former capital of the Islamist terrorists in Iraq. They ended the reign of Abu Musab al Zarqawi there, where he had created a grotesque miniature picture of what all Iraq would become if the U.S. packed up and came home, as war opponents wanted us to do.

Our troops scoured the city, and chased or killed the thug army that had made it its citadel. The fighting devastated Fallujah, which once had been home to 300,000 people. We said we would help them build a new Fallujah, when they returned. This was to be a showplace of the new Iraq, in the heart of the Sunni region, in the Baathist bastion.

Well, how's it going? Are we keeping our promise? Are we doing it well or poorly? What do the people say?

You'll never find out by reading the Associated Press. Or the New York Times. For the print media, Fallujah seems to have fallen off the map as totally as Atlantis.

Like the rest of the "rebuilding" leg of the Iraq story, Fallujah has been neglected by our media. There are exceptions, and I'll get to them in a minute. But when I scrolled back through the wire services we subscribe to -- AP, Knight-Ridder, New York Times, Cox, and half a dozen smaller papers -- for the past month, I found only a handful of stories about Fallujah.

We get daily coverage of U.S. military deaths from the AP. We get daily accounts of the terrorists' success in killing Iraqis. We get decrnt coverage of the evolving political rebirth of Iraq. But still, after two years, when it comes to the story of rebuilding Iraq, the news wires generally are silent, unless there's some bad news about Halliburton.

There are no photos of Fallujah on the AP photo desk, going back through February.

This is not a "good news" issue, as I've said before. The news might be bad. But there's no way to know if the press doesn't cover it.

Here's what I found on Fallujah.

Three stories moved on Feb. 20: One from the Boston Globe, one from the New York Daily News, one from the Washington Post. All of them reported from the city itself, and interviewed residents as well as U.S. officials. I suspect the military organized a field trip. Why didn't the AP or the New York Times go along and see?

Anne Barnard, of the Globe, found "A surprising quiet reigns on the streets of this city. ... Troops move through narrow streets with less firepower than they do in Baghdad and more readily leave the shelter of armored Humvees to talk with Iraqis. Downtown, a few shops have reopened to sell mutton and fresh fruit, and last week, traffic police reappeared, blowing whistles and waving white gloves at the cars that have trickled back into the city."

But the calm comes at the price of tight US control, and both Fallujans and the Marines say it won't last if the US military and the Iraqi government don't quicken the pace of reconstruction, which has been slowed by bureaucratic hang-ups and a tight security clampdown.

After months of insurgent misrule and a devastating invasion, Fallujans believe they deserve what one school principal summed up as "a better life than we're used to." But so far, they've received almost no clean running water, electricity, or compensation for their damaged houses.

Residents also don't like the hours-long waits at checkpoints to go in and out of the city, though they understand the purpose.

"I feel I am not welcome," said Mohammed Mahdi, an elderly man taking his wife and daughter back into the city for the first time after making a solo trip to inspect their damaged house.

He gestured at the maze of razor wire and berms he would have to cross.

"We have to have these; if we don't the terrorists will come to the city," Mahdi said. "But I ask the Marines to distinguish between terrorists and ordinary people. We suffered so much; we need respect."

The atmosphere is strikingly reminiscent of that in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq shortly after the US invasion nearly two years ago: People seem willing to forgive the destruction around them - and the indignity of occupation - if it comes with quick benefits.

Fair enough. Good reporting. Now I know something about the place that I didn't before. But how many people saw that story?

The New York Daily News sent Mark Mooney. Here's his lede:

This shattered city overrun by U.S. troops to root out terrorists is coming back to life and American officers brag it's now the safest place in Iraq. In the two months since the gunfire subsided, the bodies have been collected and rubble cleared from the streets. The Marines have recovered more than 400 weapons caches, destroyed 400,000 guns, more than 100,000 shells and nearly 800 roadside bombs. Generators hum, producing some light at night for the first time since November. Shops are stocking up again. About a dozen schools have opened because the children are back. They emerge from doorways or from behind piles of rubble in cheerful packs, hello-ing Marines or waving shyly.

He seems to have talked to more Marines, and fewer citizens, than did the Globe reporter. The tone is more positive, but then so are the quotes.

The third bit of coverage is from the Washington Post's Jackie Spinner. Her tone is decidedly negative. She pegs her lede on the director of a primary school in the city who fled before the fighting and returned to find the place a wreck.

When she returned this month, she looked around the school and cried, Hussein said in her small office, cold from the wind that was blowing in through shattered windows. The white walls were covered with messages that U.S. troops presumably left when they searched the premises for insurgents and weapons.

"Fallujah Kill Bodys," one message read. "USA No. 1," said another. And on a wall behind her, next to framed verses from the Koran, the Islamic holy book: "We came. We saw. We took over all. P.S. To help you."

Schoolbooks were strewn about, the doors were broken down and student records were torn and scattered, Hussein said. The scene was almost too much to face, she said, grappling with how to move on with her life amid the rubble of the nearly two-month battle.

Like many residents who have returned to Fallujah, Hussein is not sure how she feels about the military operation that silenced a terrifying insurgency but left the city in ruins and with an occupying force whose armored vehicles roam the streets.

"I cried so much. This is my dear city," she said, clasping her plump fingers, which peeked out of the sleeves of a long black dress. "We were hoping the Americans would bring us a better life than we had."

As the battlefield is gradually transformed into a construction zone, U.S. officials acknowledge that they have a limited amount of time to establish faith among residents eager for life to return to normal. If they do not rebuild the city quickly enough, the officials say, they risk losing their already tenuous support, a potentially dangerous situation with insurgents still reported in the city.

"We have a matter of weeks to get this right," said Col. John R. Ballard, commander of the Marine 4th Civil Affairs Group, based in Washington.

Yet Spinner seems to be the one paying the most attention to Fallujah. Before this one-day mini-flurry of coverage, only three other Fallujah stories appear on the wire, going back to the time of the Iraqi elections. One is a short piece by Mooney (dated Feb. 18) about hundreds of Fallujans turning out to apply for jobs on the new police force. The other two are by Spinner.

On Feb. 16, she wrote one under the headline "In a Calmer Fallujah, Marines Still Feel Insurgents' Pulse."

The Marines jumped out of their armored vehicles on a quiet dirt road in the center of this battle-torn city, with mounds of crumbled bricks, twisted metal and debris on both sides.

Within minutes, the patrol from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, Weapons Company was surrounded by dozens of hands pulling at their arms and reaching for their pockets.

"Mister, mister," little voices chirped, as a swelling group of 20 children pushed each other out of the way and called out for pieces of chocolate. The older, savvier ones grabbed a baby, borrowing one from a stranger if they had to, held it up and said, "Baby, baby," in English, an effort to get more candy from the Combined Anti-Armored Team.

Lance Cpl. Richard Setterstrom, a piece of shrapnel still in his leg from a Dec. 12 battle with insurgents, moved beyond the children and past badly damaged houses, each one marked with a red "X" to indicate that it had been cleared of weapons.

"It's weird walking by a house that we burned and seeing a family in it now," said Setterstrom, 19, of Butte, Mont.

"See that house?" said Lance Cpl. Michael Catalano, 19, of Lafayette, Colo., pointing across a large puddle of rainwater and sewage to a brown, two-story structure, its sides blackened from smoke. "A Marine died there."

For these Marines, the relative ease with which they walked through Fallujah one day last week was nearly as jarring as the sudden blasts of gunfire that greeted them during the U.S.-led offensive to retake the city from insurgents in early November. Although Marine commanders declared the battle over about a week after ground forces entered the city, deadly clashes continued through most of December.

And so forth. On Feb. 13, another story moved under her byline (I'm assuming "Jackie" is a woman). It was called "Returning to Fallujah." This one focused on the city residents.

Mohammed Farhan Jasam shifted from side to side on the dirt road at the bus stop, his feet dancing impatiently.

His youngest son, Barah, 12, stood beside him, trying to catch a glimpse of the bus that would shuttle them a few miles to the center of Fallujah.

Jasam and his family fled Fallujah before U.S.-led forces began an offensive Nov. 7 to retake the city from insurgents. The family moved to Ramadi, about 25 miles to the west.

On Sunday, Jasam, 50, an agricultural engineer who operates a honeybee farm outside the city, returned for the first time, anxious to see his house after hearing from neighbors that its gate and fence had been damaged in the fighting.

More than a dozen people bunched at the bus stop in front of a bullet-ridden apartment building. Finally, unable to stand the wait any longer, Jasam and his son set out on foot.

"I am very happy," Jasam said. "Between the terrorists and the Americans, we didn't have a chance to do anything. They were both pressing on us. I think the problem is solved."

At least 1,000 people a day pass through this bus stop on the northwestern edge of Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, on their way back to the city, said Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Willis, 22, of Petersburg, Ill.

The stop, manned by members of the 81mm mortar platoon from the Marine 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment Weapons Company, is at one of five entry points into the city controlled jointly by U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces. They are the only legal way into city.

As part of their duties, Willis and Lance Cpl. Michael Ray, 20, of Central City, Iowa, flag down civilian cars with an extra seat or two for those waiting for the bus, hand out water, call for escorts and direct people to a booth where they can get new residence cards, a requirement for re-entering the city.

Sunday, Ray sat on the hood of his Humvee and eyed the residents from behind dark shades. He said he could not wait to get home next month.

"This is a waste of time," Ray said. "I think they let the people back in too soon before they made sure the city was clear of insurgents."

There you go. You can quibble with the tone, but at least WaPo is out there, paying attention to the story, to the place that, for months, defined the U.S. frustration in Iraq. If you read that paper, you might not know everything, but you at least know something.

Where's everyone else?

[Needless to say, my paper picked up none of these stories.]

UPDATE: American Digest linked to this post, and gave it the headline I wish I had thought of: Atlantis of the Sands.

History on the Fly

More history on the fly, written in the first person, from Battlefield Fallujah. History writers: Save it, mark it, and someday, for once, the real war just might get into the books.

3/5 began the actual attack on the city by taking an apartment complex on the northwest corner of the city. It was key terrain as the elevated positions allowed the command to look down into the attack lanes. The Marines took the apartments quickly and moved to the rooftops and began engaging enemy that were trying to move into their fighting positions. The scene on the rooftop was surreal. Machine gun teams were running boxes of ammo up 8 flights of stairs in full body armor and carrying up machine guns while snipers engaged enemy shooters. The whole time the enemy was firing mortars and rockets at the apartments.

...

We came up behind 3/5 one day as the lead squads were working down the Byzantine streets of the Jolan area. An assault team of two Marines ran out from behind cover and put a rocket into a wall of an enemy strongpoint. Before the smoke cleared the squad behind them was up and moving through the hole and clearing the house. Just down the block another squad was doing the same thing. The house was cleared quickly and the Marines were running down the street to the next contact.

Repeat

Time to bring back the Fallujah map.

Great Reporting from Fallujah

By an embedded reporter from the "Telegraph."

"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering through the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) mounted on one of Phantom's Humvees.

"Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range 950 metres. I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons."

Capt Kirk Mayfield, commander of the Phantoms, called for fire from his task force's mortar team. But Sgt Anyett didn't want to wait. "Dude, give me the sniper rifle. I can take them out - I'm from Alabama."