The focus is on Fallujah and the upcoming attempt to take it back. The ramifications of this are huge. I'm not sure they can take it back. They failed once before. If they do take it back there won't be much left of it. Vietnam all over again. "We destroyed the village to save it." The ramifications are also personal. My son-in-law has been in Ramadi. Three days ago he was flown to Fallujah. He is Army communications supporting the Marines.

Some Terrorists...
by Riverbend

The sky has been overcast these last few days. It’s a smoggy, grayish combination of dust, smoke and humidity. I guess it has matched the general mood in many ways- somewhat dark and heavy. I’ve been very worried about Falloojeh. So worried, in fact, that I find it hard to sleep at night, wondering how the situation will unfold in that troubled area. Things are bad in Baghdad, but they are far worse in Falloojeh. Refugees have been flowing out of the area for weeks now. They’ve been trying to find havens in Baghdad and the surrounding regions. I met my first Falloojeh refugees last week. One of my aunts was feeling a little bit under the weather and the phones in her area were down, so we decided to pay a brief visit after breaking the fast in the evening. As we pulled our car into her driveway, I discerned strange, childish voices in the garden. Since my aunt has only an eight-year-old daughter, S., I assumed the neighbors’ children were over to play. [...] It makes me crazy to see Bush and Allawi talking about the casualties in Falloojeh like every single person there is a terrorist lurking not in a home, but in some sort of lair, making plans to annihilate America. Allawi was recently talking about how the ‘peace talks’ weren’t going very well and a major military operation was the only option available. That garbage and the rest about Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi is for Americans, Brits and Iraqis living in comfortable exile. Allawi is vile and the frightening thing is that he will *never* be safe in Iraq without American military support. As long as he is in power, there will be American tanks and bases all over the country. How does he expect to win any support by threatening to unleash the occupation forces against Falloojeh? People are greeting refugees from Falloojeh like heroes. They are emptying rooms in houses to accommodate them and donating food, money and first-aid supplies. Everyone here knows Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi isn’t in Falloojeh. He isn’t anywhere, as far as anyone can tell. He’s like the WMD: surrender your weapons or else we’ll attack. Now that the damage is done, it is discovered that there were no weapons. It will be the same with Zarqawi. We laugh here when we hear one of our new politicians discuss him. He’s even better than the WMD- he has legs. As soon as the debacle in Falloojeh is over, Zarqawi will just move conveniently to Iran, Syria or even North Korea. As for the ‘peace talks’ with Falloojeh- they never existed. They’ve been bombing Falloojeh for several weeks now. They usually do the bombing during the night, and no one is there to cover the damage and all the deaths. It’s only later we hear about complete families being buried alive or shot to death by snipers on the street. By the way, Americans- 100,000 deaths in a year and a half, and the number is rising. Keep Bush another four years and we just might hit the half-million mark…

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Highest US troop level ahead of Fallujah assault

America has increased its troop numbers in Iraq to their highest levels since the war ended, it emerged today. Home leave has been delayed for several months for tens of thousands US soldiers, in preparation for the January elections and the impending attack on Fallujah.

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Split over Falluja puts US on the spot

A split within the Iraqi interim government over whether to attack the rebel stronghold of Falluja is likely to put US commanders in difficulty, as they have insisted that Baghdad has ultimate authority over the operation.

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Four Decades of Imperial Hubris
By David H. Hackworth

In most of the wars we’ve fought, our leaders have understood our enemies and how to take them down. But in the current shootout – a continuation of the revolutionary fervor first ignited in Algeria in the 1960s, then fanned by the Iranian Revolution, a huge Jihad victory against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Israel’s humiliating withdrawal from Lebanon and its interminable fight in Palestine culminating in 9/11 and our retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – America’s leaders from both major parties and our military and intelligence establishments remain in deep denial and blindly continue to believe that because we’ve got the power, we shall overcome. Ditto a large chunk of the American public that has sent me gigabytes of e-mail about how we should do a Goldwater on the bad guys and “bomb them back to the Stone Age” – when that's where most of our 1.3 billion potential Islamic opponents already are. If ignorance is bliss, America might have cornered the market on happiness. But unless we get real and bend our brains around what motivates our enemy, we will never prevail against the increasing millions of polarized Muslims who are becoming more united with every explosion of smart bombs and every Yankee occupation boot stumping across their turf. It’s a commonly held belief among Muslims that the United States is grabbing their land in order to destroy their faith and their ancient way of life. Most believe that our unconditional support of repressive Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and other “friendly” Arab lands is all about keeping the people in chains and sucking up their oil on the cheap at a price that Joe and Jane Doe can pay at the U.S. pump without stroking out. “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us,” writes “Anonymous,” the author of Imperial Hubris, a critically important book that defines Osama and what’s driving his bombers. And the reasons don’t “have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world.”

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