Falluja Follies

More and more I seem to find myself in agreement with unexpected sources. For instance, the best bottom line I've heard on Falluja comes from Charles Pena at the Cato Institute...

"For Falluja to be a success from the U.S. perspective, we would have to achieve something pretty close to total victory -- not just retaking real estate but accomplishing real strategic objectives. That could be capturing al-Zarqawi or being able to say we've destroyed his network, and that the net result is a reduction in the violence in Iraq and an increase in security.

"What do the bad guys have to do? They've got to not lose. And not lose just simply means surviving to fight another day. And that's exactly what they've done."

Meanwhile, our military leadership seems to be devoted to a strategy of diminished expectations, with Joint Chiefs Chair Richard Myers reduced to telling us what our actions won't do, rather than what we expect they will.

"If anybody thinks that Falluja's going to be the end of the insurgency in Iraq, that was never the objective, never our intention and even never our hope."

Whatever the objective of the attack on Falluja is supposed to be, the results offer little encouragement. It's true that so far the casualty rate, with US fatalities and 178 wounded in action as of yesterday, is lighter than I feared, but that seems to be the result of the insurgents following what Pena describes as their path to victory. While we conduct a house to house occupation of the city that's been built up in the popular imagination of the center of all that's wrong in Iraq, the battle seems to be spreading like wildfire.

Some highlights from the New York Times...

...insurgents elsewhere in Iraq appear to have opened up a second front in the fighting by overrunning police stations and laying siege to the provincial headquarters in Mosul.

****

In downtown Baghdad, a powerful suicide car bomb exploded on a busy commercial street Thursday morning, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 30 others. In the evening, explosions rattled across the capital with a frequency not seen here since August, when American soldiers fought a Shiite uprising in the south.

****

Violence surged throughout the Sunni triangle west of Baghdad, with ambushes, bombings and mortar attacks jolting Tikrit, Kirkuk, Hawija, Samarra and the provincial capital of Ramadi, just 30 miles west of Falluja.

...and the battle for 'hearts and minds' doesn't seem to be going any better.

Thursday afternoon, the Muslim Scholars Association, a powerful group of Sunni clerics that says it represents 3,000 mosques, held a news conference in Baghdad at which it condemned the offensive in Falluja and renewed its call for a boycott of elections scheduled for January. It said it was in negotiations with other political groups to get them to join the boycott.

So much for the notion that the 'liberation' of Falluja was essential to the free and fair conduct of the January elections.

Of course, I blame Rumsfeld. In some ways the situation in Falluja is the whole war in Iraq in miniature. Just as Rummy's battle plan was predicated on the idea that capturing Baghdad would be the successful culmination of the original invasion, he sold the battle for Falluja as an mission that would "will deal a blow to the terrorists in the country and should move Iraq further away from a future of violence to one of freedom and opportunity for the Iraqi people." And just as the headlong rush to Baghdad only set the stage for a protracted guerilla war, the battle for Falluja seems to be producing more widespread violence in a setting of martial law.

And once again, the outcome is FUBAR.

Shouldn't it be completely apparent to every sentient being that Rummy's got to go?