FUBAR in Fallujah

If you think you know what's actually happening in Fallujah, I guess it puts you at least one step ahead of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Air Force General Richard Meyers was emphatic on the Sunday morning talk shows, saying that "...news media were "very, very inaccurate" in their reporting about Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh," and he appears to have been right, at least after the fact. Although the Marine commander on the ground, Lt. General James Conway, had apparently installed Saleh as the leader of the newly formed 'Fallujah Brigade,' his judgement has been overruled in favor of yet another former Iraqi army commander, Mohammed Latif, who once served in the Iraqi intelligence corps but apparently fell into disfavor with Saddam Hussein and spent some time in exile.

Several reasons have been put forward for the decision to countermand the decision made on the scene. Reuters reports that the appointment of Saleh "...sparked anger, however, among Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime and accused Saleh of being a former general in the feared Republican Guard responsible for putting down a Shi'ite Muslim uprising in 1991." Fallujah, of course, is a Sunni stronghold, so I doubt that any of those complaints were local. I doubt, in fact, that any such concerns were persuasive.

I tend to side with the judgement expressed at The Left Coaster, where they suppose that the real problem was that "Saleh said that there weren’t foreign fighters in Fallujah, which was against the White House party line that outside terrorists were stoking up all the troubles, and not the natives, who, of course according to the White House storybook all love us as liberators. Saleh also had the misfortune of saying that the Baathists should be rehired to make the place work again, which of course is true."

In fact, Saleh, who seemed to have been greeted with glee by the locals and was able to quickly assemble a body of troops willing to accept his command, is now being mentioned as the proposed commander of the first battalion of the new brigade, so it's hard to imagine that any Iraqi objections to his appointment were instrumental in his apparent demotion. It's also unclear how that news will be received on the Fallujan street, although I imagine that any Iraqi commander will be favored over any American.

That's not the only subject Meyers addressed, though. He also insisted that "The reports that the Marines have pulled back, not true. The Marines are still where they've been."

That seems to be demonstrably untrue, by the testimony of virtually anyone who has been on the scene. The AP report from the scene says that "Two Marine units -- the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment -- withdrew from their positions in the southern part of Fallujah on Friday. The 1st Battalion had moved back to a base about five miles from the city, while the 2nd Battalion has moved south of the city."

So Meyers appears to be half right on one count and all wrong on another. Only one thing seems to be certain. In the words of an unnamed fomer Iraqi colonel who spoke to the Washington Post, "If the American army doesn't enter the city, nobody will shoot at them."

(Meyers had a few things to say about Abu Ghraib, too, and so will I in a bit...)