WP: In Two Sieges, U.S. Finds Itself Shut Out

Officials Find No Good Options for Ending Fallujah, Najaf Standoffs

Thursday, April 29, 2004; Page A01

FALLUJAH, Iraq, April 28 -- Perched atop sandbags and peering through powerful binoculars, Marine officers manning front-line positions around this tense city can see the problem clearly enough, even through the swirling dust that gives Fallujah the sepia hue of a Wild West town: Military-age men in white robes swagger about with impunity, they say, hardening their defenses and resupplying their encampments.

The Marines say the men are Sunni Muslim guerrillas who have taken over this Euphrates River city and transformed it into a stronghold of resistance to the American occupation of Iraq.

But neither here, nor in the Baghdad palace that serves as the headquarters of the U.S. occupation administration, nor in the corridors of official Washington, is the solution to the Fallujah problem clear. Although American officials and Iraq's U.S.-backed leaders agree that the insurgents should be captured or killed, preferably before the Americans hand over limited sovereignty on June 30, no good options exist to accomplish that goal, according to U.S. officials familiar with the issue.

A further incursion into Fallujah -- the only way many Marine officers say the insurgency here can be squelched -- has been rejected by local and national Iraqi leaders as an unacceptable risk to tens of thousands of noncombatants in the city.

"There are a lot of different proposals on the table, but all of them are fraught with problems," said one senior U.S. official in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The same dilemma confronts U.S. military commanders and civilian officials 130 miles to the south, in the holy city of Najaf…

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51498-2004Apr28.html

That is all...

Or we could just declare a victory and get out before we do any more damage.

Be honest with the people of Iraq, tell them all the bush team wants is control of the oil and the people of Iraq can do anything they want and all will be well with the bush team.
Eventually the people of Iraq can rebuild with all the profits they will get from the sale of their oil to the bush teams friends. As you know the friends of the bush team are very kind and willing to share the wealth, just as they do with the people of America, why just look how good they are to the seniors and workers or America.

kill all those bad insurgents for us?
It's a mystery.

It could be that the good guys are unarmed while the evildoers are armed. So the solution is to arm the good Fallughans (298,000 out of 300,000). Pour arms into the place and let them fight it out. By God, those evildoers will be wiped out in no time.

The good guys are the ones who are risking their lives to defend their own country. The evil doers must be all of those nasty foreign troops- you know, the ones from that fundamentalist oppressive regime that wants to give the locals limited souvernity cause they aren't "civilized" yet and need to be learnt how to do it our way.

Great way to put it. And welcome. :hi:

... where virtually all households have guns.

I'd be willing to bet my car that nearly every G.I. outside the city understands this, and understands that they're up against the will of the vast majority of the city's population.

That, of course, won't help them when they kill kids. (A similar agony haunted us in 'Nam.)

I was thinking myself they could use a few more SAMs and
ATWs, perhaps some extra heavy MGs to take on all those
bad guys.

Talk about impertinence. Next thing you know, they will figure that they own the place.

That article was quite the unbalanced propaganda piece.

and frankly, John Kerry needs to say so. Look at this attack on the English language:

"the only way many Marine officers say the insurgency here can be squelched ", imagine if you were being squelched...I know I don't want to be squelched that's for certain.

"There are a lot of different proposals on the table, but all of them are fraught with problems," like how can we kill these guys without being caught killing their children.

This war is filthy, and people who make decisions like it's time to squelch somebody shouldn't be in leadership positions in this country, agree?

:hi:

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

They are like kids playing with matches and burning down the house.

Yeah, if these people were not in power, they'd be written off as complete wackos, unable to get the attention of even an ape. I mean, their whole plan of world domination is something you might expect in a kid's creative writing class. But when you've got history's most massive propaganda machine behind you, anything is possible. anything.

Kids playing with matches are just kids, these people know they are evil, yet perceive no consequences of that evil. This is what distinguishes evil from ignorance, which are quite related don't you think? These people are more like the people that our beloved forefathers revolted against 229 years ago than like children.

Jefferson said that a little revolution is good now and gain, that it is the sign of healthy democracy.

Yes, it's the most corrupt administration in this country's history by far. Makes Nixon look penny ante.

The chimp said it, it must be true.

I heard this while three different fires were plainly burning in the city from bombardment. Normalcy is a Spectre attack followed by 500 lb bombs.

Did you hear Kissenger? No one is listening to Perle, Wolfowitz or Gaffney any more, they are obviously on some foreign agenda that has nothing to do with our national interest or the reality of what our troops are struggling with in Iraq. They are pursuing a higher cause which only they can devine. So they roll out Kissenger to say that this is a "turning point." So we'll be getting our advice from the man who led us in our last catastrophic and excruciating defeat.

This must be the new talking point as the commander on the scene Abasaid says things aren't going too well and that there isn't a military solution. I haven't heard anyone rebuke him for his insight yet. He has the potential to become a tragic figure of history. Another popular military analyst called it a "Stalingrad." These decisive analyses are delusional.

If we could kill every fighter in Fallujah nothing will have changed fundamentally in Iraq. The bombings, the IEDs, the ambushes will go until we leave. Every time we conduct an operation we create more fighters. Let's forget about all the children that died during the embargo. Maybe we only killed 100,000 people in the two wars and injured another 100,000. Considering the tribal structure of the country, there is a hard core of people throughout the country who want retribution. We are involved in a vendetta. Nobody wins a vendetta short of an extermination. There is the ancient practice to burn cities to the ground. What would the ultimate response to that be? Something horrible here in CONUS I imagine.

No matter what happens in Fallujah, it isn't going to get better in Iraq. The killing of Americans won't stop until we leave. If you want to be cynical, we'd be better off going low profile and manipulating the bloody factions from the outside. Pick a violent group and back that horse covertly or not so covertly if you have to, but get the troops out. The grand geo-strategic vision thing is strategic bullshit.

Stalingrad broke the back of hitler's army.

Russia was totally outgunned, but they had the russian winter on their side. And they had the fact that they were defending their homeland.

An analagous situation exists here. Sure the iraqis are outgunned by US troops, but the weather is starting to warm up there, and before long it'll be summer again. As the russians were aclimated to the winters there, the iraqis are aclimated to the summers. Our people are used to airconditioning, not iraq summers.

And with the reports of insurgents now having ground to air missles, our troops just may be denied air cover, and that aint good.

These insane fuckers are just like Sharon. Blood keeps them in power. Fear keeps them in power. If you want freedom slash the tires of Hummers and perfect lawns..

Should I use the big nuke or the smaller nuke? Oh gee, I can't make up my mind. Might as well use both.

Kiss you Presidency good-bye Bush.

You'e one big stupid failure. Face it. GO HOME!

Hmmm...All that blather about the "mighty US military" and we can't even win these two battles? Once again, like Nam, it proves that all the weaponry in the world doesn't always win wars and wars don't solve anything. The Vietnamese beat us with booby traps and bamboo sticks. This is what happens when you get a bunch of egomaniacs running the show and a complete idiot in the WH.