>From the eXile.
Fallujah 2: Bush Bushwhacks the Marines By Gary Brecher ( war_nerd at exile.ru )
Last time I took you on a nostalgia tour of our first year in Fallujah, from April 2003, when we blasted 20-odd demonstrators outside the local schoolhouse to March 2004.
Today I'll bring the story up to date by tracking our last four months in F-Town -- the wildest four months since Napoleon decided he was bored with Elba and hijacked a boat for the mainland.
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http://www.exile.ru/195/war_nerd.html
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Yeah, as usual, our war nerd gets the technical details right but misses the larger lesson which is not, as he seems to be saying, that Bush is a chickenshit. Sure he is, but that's not the point.
Of course the US Marines could have flattened Fallujah or taken it after what probably would have been an extraordinarily bloody round of house to house fighting. Of all the branches of the US military, the Marines are the genuine article - true professional killers. No, they're usually not like the folks who joined in hopes of a better life through training or educational 'opportunites' and they're not like the 30 and 40 something weekend warriors who found themselves caught up in the maelstrom. The Marines want to fight and they want to fight against real odds.
We can admire or we can disdain but for now it is what it is.
And as for the Fallujah fighters, well, according to Juan Cole and on-the-ground testimony by Marines who have some sense of their opponent's skills, although there were a lot of irregular jihadis and just plain pissed folks with access to serious hand held kill-tech and more guts than precision it's clear a good number of hardcore pros - Republican Guard and Iraqi Special Op guys who mostly sat back, smoked and watched television while the M1s and the Bradleys first rolled into Baghdad, waiting to see how things shook out - decided to show their capabilities against a worthy foe.
So the two sides, though unevenly matched in equipment, possessed the capability to bring a world of hurt and death to each other with enthusiasm and dedication.
But the Marines would have overwhelmed in the end.
And then what war nerd? What would have happened after the Marines quieted the city through the free application of u-tipped ammo? The war nerd tells us that Washington's 'loss of nerve for political reasons' (the upcoming election he supposes) put the Marines in a bad spot and emboldened our adversaries who now use Fallujah as a sort of Alamo-Stalingrad-Waterloo signpost of American failure.
But surely a 'victory', declared atop the pulverized bones of thousands of Fallujans, would have served equally well as a rallying point - a lesson of what the Americans will do if they come a calling. And even in defeat the Fallujan defenders, who surely would have extracted their own pound of flesh from the Marines' hide in close quarter combat, would have been hailed as heroes - their failure seen as the acts of the honored dead in the way Japanese Shimpu pilots were viewed by true believers in the final days of the Pacific War.
There is another way to say this: for the Americans, there are no good options.
.d.