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Monday, November 08, 2004

Battle for Falluja

CNN:

Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said Monday he has given U.S. and Iraqi forces the green light to rid the city of Falluja of insurgents, and he promised to restore law and order. "We are determined to clean Falluja from terrorists," Allawi said at a news conference.
This is the most important battle of the war since the end of major combat operation in May of '03. I expect it will go well for our side. We have learned a lot in the battles of Najaf and Samara and I think that those lessons will be valuable in Falluja. Another thing that will help us is that a lot of the civilians have already left Falluja (at least according to several of the Iraqi blogs) which makes it harder for the insurgents to use them as living shields. Hopefully this assault will go well, and hopefully we will capture or kill Zarqawi.

2 Comments:

Blogger The probligo said...

You will have to excuse my cynicism.

There were much publicised reports that the war to liberate Iraq was over.

Seems not.

11/08/2004 01:51:00 PM  
Blogger Dave Justus said...

There is a certain amount of justification for this cynicism. I will admit that when the Iraq War started I expected things to be better by this point in time.

However, if you look at the nature of the combatants we are currently facing, this all makes a bit more sense.

By May 2003 (the famous end of major combat operations) the Iraqi Army was basically gone and at that time it appeared that only a few Baathists remained working as a very unpopular insurgency.

Over the rest of 2003 we saw a small, but still deadly insurgency, but one that was increasingly dominated by foreign fighters. This trend reached in zenith in April 2004 with the twin uprising of the Sunni/Foreign terrorist/ex-Baathist insurgency centered on Fallujah and the Sadrist uprising among the Shiites.

The eventual strategy (admittedly after a few false starts) to deal with these uprisings was to concentrate on the Shiite uprising in the south first and then deal with the Fallujah uprising later. We have been very successful in dealing with the former, and I have every reason to believe we will be equally successful with the later.

What is most interesting about both of these later uprisings is the foreign connections to them. Iran is widely accepted to being behind the Sadrist uprising, while the Fallujah group is certainly strongly leavened with foreign terrorists (it is unclear exactly what involvement any foreign governments may have.)

For those of us who supported the war in Iraq primarily because of the belief that a free, democratic, and prosperous Iraq could cause a domino effect on the region which in turn would greatly decrease the terror risk it is somewhat heartening to realize that terrorists and despotic governments share this belief and are doing everything in their power to prevent a democratic Iraq from succeeding.

11/08/2004 04:10:00 PM  

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