You have to go to the San Diego Union or the NY Post to get an article that thinks we are doing well in Iraq.
Fallujah battle inflicted crippling defeat on terrorists
By Robert J. Caldwell
December 5, 2004
The long view of history's judgment will determine whether the battle of Fallujah was a strategic triumph or merely a tactical victory. Did it break the back of the terrorist insurgency in Iraq, or inflict only a temporary setback on the enemy? Time will tell.
What we do know now is that the fight for Fallujah was won, and won decisively. This was the biggest allied military victory in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.
American Marines and soldiers and their Iraqi allies took on Iraq's terrorist stronghold, headquarters of the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and flattened their enemy. Zarqawi's killers, bombers and hostage takers who had turned Fallujah into a terrorist bastion are now dead, captured or in flight. In 10 days of tough urban fighting, every block of Fallujah's 20 square kilometers was meticulously cleared by coalition forces going house to house and room to room.
The best current estimate is that between 1,200 and 1,600 insurgent combatants were killed in Fallujah. Hundreds more were wounded. Additional hundreds were captured. The headquarters, base areas, storehouses, arms depots, ammunition dumps and bomb factories that fed the Iraq insurgency were seized from a determined and now defeated enemy.
The cost in American lives, while heartrending, was far less than might have been expected in taking a city so well defended by a heavily armed foe that had months to prepare. The Pentagon reports that 71 American soldiers and Marines were killed in the fight for Fallujah and about 450 were wounded. Sixty percent of those wounded have returned to duty.
For the American military, this was the biggest urban battle since Hue City was retaken from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive in 1968. The battle for Hue (admittedly against a more numerous and formidable enemy) took a month and cost the lives of nearly 500 American and South Vietnamese troops. Fallujah was taken in a third the time and at less than one-fifth the cost in casualties.
The dire predictions about urban warfare in Iraq proved mostly groundless. This was far – very, very far – from the urban "quagmire" or Stalingrad-in-Iraq forecast by the professional pessimists who continue to predict military disaster in Iraq.
Coalition forces allowed time for most of Fallujah's civilian population to evacuate the city before the fighting began. Civilian casualties were held to a minimum. Damage to the city was inevitably extensive but reconstruction, aided by coalition forces and the interim Iraqi government, is already beginning.
Meanwhile, what American and coalition forces found in Fallujah leaves no doubt that it was Zarqawi's terrorists who turned this city in Iraq's Sunni heartland into a legitimate military target.
At last count, here is some of what was found in Fallujah.
Of Fallujah's 100 mosques, 60 were used as defensive positions by armed combatants fighting U.S. and Iraqi government forces. Under international law, religious structures used for military purposes forfeit their protected status.
Of Fallujah's roughly 1,000 city blocks, 203 contained weapons caches and ammunition storehouses.
To date, 653 Improvised Explosive Devices (i.e., roadside bombs) have been found in Fallujah.
So far, 11 factories for manufacturing bombs and explosive devices have been found in Fallujah.
Three of Fallujah's hospitals were used by insurgents as defensive positions from which small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades were directed at U.S. and coalition forces.
American troops discovered three houses used by terrorists to torture and kill hostages. All three had walls and floors spattered with the dried blood of hostage victims, plus banners and flags typically displayed as backdrops in hostage videos.
At a facility terrorist forces called the National Islamic Resistance Operational Center, Iraqi security forces found four videos of hostages being beheaded, military training videos, plus jihadist propaganda videos that included recorded attacks on coalition forces. One unidentified hostage was rescued.
Weapons found in Fallujah included nearly 1,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, some 800 mortar rounds, hundreds of grenades, 86 anti-tank guided missiles, 6,000 artillery and mortar fuses, 87 122mm and 107mm rockets, 328 rounds for recoilless artillery pieces and uncounted numbers of Kalashnikov automatic rifles and other assorted small arms.
Was the victory in Fallujah complete? No. Zarqawi and several hundred insurgent combatants are believed to have escaped Fallujah before the coalition attack began, leaving the rest of his motley army of fighters to die. Subsequent insurgent attacks elsewhere in Iraq demonstrate, not unexpectedly, that insurgents can operate from other base areas.
Thus the Fallujah offensive has been followed by coalition sweeps through Ramadi and other insurgent areas in the Sunni triangle. These offensive actions must continue if the terrorists are to be kept off balance and their planned attacks pre-empted whenever possible.
It's axiomatic that insurgencies are rarely defeated by military means alone. The terrorist-driven insurgency in Iraq will prove no exception. The U.S.-led coalition and its Iraqi allies need a political track, too, and they have one. The national elections scheduled for Jan. 30 will put a popular government committed to a democratic Iraq in place. That will give 25 million Iraqis a tangible stake in defeating the terrorist spoilers in their midst.
In the meantime, count Fallujah as the biggest victory yet over the reactionary forces of terror out to abort the new Iraq before it can be born.
Caldwell is editor of Insight and can be reached via e-mail at robert.caldwell@ uniontrib.com.
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