US-Iraqi Troops Enter Falluja

The Bush administration could just as easily have sent the Marines and their Iraqi helots into the “rebel stronghold of Falluja” during the debates with Senator Kerry. The butcher’s bill for the Americans has been very low, and the resistance has been light. Intelligence has said that the big shots have already skipped town, and despite that, there are some corners of the media and the punditocracy that are talking about the Falluja as if it were Stalingrad. Even the word “battle” is off the mark.

On the pacifist left and in the chattering classes in the Muslim world, the deaths of the innocents in Falluja are being portrayed as disasters for America and the Allawi government. This is ridiculous. Those who are likely to be inflamed by such things reached saturation levels long ago. It is unlikely that a few more deaths will spark a huge turning of the tide. By some estimates, 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the American-led invasion. Callous though it sounds, it is difficult to believe a few more will matter.

The next nonsense comes from the Bush administration’s backers (though not, interestingly, from Donald Rumsfeld, unmuzzled post-election). Falluja is not a “tipping point.” Guerrilla wars don’t follow Wharton Business School models. Robert McNamara proved that by screwing up the Vietnam War forty years ago. The insurgents have run away, blending in with the civilian population to fight another day.

A third mistake currently in circulation says that the attack has made the elections in January implausible because the Sunnis of Falluja and elsewhere will boycott them. Since the Shia are 60% of the population, and there are sizeable numbers of Kurds up north, the Sunni vote doesn’t matter whether it turns up on polling day or not. It would be a useful smoke-screen to provide Mr. Allawi a sham legitimacy, but the Shia are going to run Iraq if there is anything like a fair election. And that’s why the Sunnis have been fighting against the liberation/occupation/Allawi regime.

The real test in Falluja is whether the Iraqis in the US-led attack were worth a damn. Figures in the media vary, but it looks like there was one Iraqi for every half dozen GI Joes. Until that proportion is reversed and then doubled, there can be no Iraqi security force worthy of the name. And until that happens, the guerrilla war will continue.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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