I am really afraid that we will stop and negotiate. We need to level the place as a lesson to the rest of Iraq.
Finishing in Fallujah
This time the offensive shouldn't stop for political reasons.
WSJ.COM
Friday, November 5, 2004 12:01 a.m.
John Kerry and most of the major media tried to make President Bush's handling of Iraq the issue this election year. They lost big. Despite the dicey security situation there and a constant drumbeat of bad news, American voters showed steadier nerves and more common sense than critics who tried to portray every setback as evidence of "criminal incompetence."
But this is hardly the moment for Mr. Bush to take a victory lap. Elections in Iraq have been promised by January, and as Mr. Bush claimed his new mandate Wednesday, Marines near Fallujah mourned the loss of eight of their colleagues in a weekend car bomb attack. Those deaths were in part the result of the commander-in-chief's decision--one of the few inarguable mistakes of the war--to stop last April's offensive there just days shy of taking control of the city, which has since become headquarters for the jihadists and Baathists who are terrorizing Iraq.
We wish we could put a better spin on it, but American men have been getting killed by bombs being built in a city they have been prevented from conquering for fear of the political consequences. This is made only slightly more defensible by the fact that the feared fallout was what might happen on the perennially overestimated "Arab street" rather than any crude electoral calculus here at home. We'll call it the al Jazeera effect, and as President Bush contemplates his national security team for the second term we hope he remembers who among his advisers gave him the bad advice.
And it's not just Americans who have been dying needlessly. The insurgents' real game is to target any and all Iraqis who share our vision of a democratic future. Just this week they assassinated an Oil Ministry official and released videotapes showing the beheadings of three Iraqi National Guardsmen and one Iraqi Army officer. We can hardly expect to win the counterinsurgency so long as Iraqis have more reason to fear the consequences of working with us than those of working against us.
To their credit, both President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi appear to understand this now and to have concluded that the April pullback in Fallujah was a mistake. The task of reasserting control in the Sunni Triangle began early last month, when combined U.S.-Iraqi forces took Samarra to the north of Baghdad.
Now comes the far more difficult job of securing the corridor beginning in the al Mansour neighborhood of west Baghdad (scene of many recent kidnappings) and running past Baghdad Airport and on out to Ramadi. Its epicenter is Fallujah, and the lawlessness of the whole area hasn't been primarily for lack of troops on street corners (there could never have been enough troops to execute a passive defense) but because of our inability to hit the bad guys in their safe haven except from the air.
Signs are that this may be about to change. The Marines have had a cordon around Fallujah for a couple weeks now, and U.S. warplanes and artillery have been striking insurgent positions. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that American and Iraqi troops will be able to take the city, and with minimal loss of life on the coalition side. But if the coming battle rages for more than a few days, political fissures could erupt in the interim government--President Ghazi Yawer, a Sunni, was among those crying foul during the April offensive--leading to pressure for another "third way" illusion like the now defunct Fallujah Brigade that leaves legitimate authorities with something less than full control.
We hope Messrs. Bush and Allawi understand that this would be the worst of all possible outcomes--worse even than no offensive at all given the morale supercharge it would mean for the enemy. Anything less than total victory would also mean no nationwide elections for the foreseeable future.
In short, what's needed in Iraq right now is neither strategic nor tactical genius but simple resolve. In his press conference yesterday, President Bush reminded us that he has the "vision thing" right when it comes to the war on terror. He paid tribute to the spread of freedom and democracy as America's best protection over the long run and took credit for the recent elections in Afghanistan. Now he needs to show that he can hang tough through what may be some difficult days in Iraq, days without which credible elections there will probably never be possible, and days without which Americans will very likely start to turn against the war.
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