Well — with several dozen Americans dead, many more American wounded, and who knows how many Iraqi casualties that we’ll never be able to count — we now control Fallujah again. I heard an American official quoted on NPR this morning saying that we’ve “broken the back” of the resistance.
When we invaded Iraq a year and a half ago, we broke the back of the resistance pretty quickly, too. Only it turned out that the resistance had simply dissolved into the countryside to regroup. Similarly, today, most of the Iraqis from Fallujah seemed to have moved on before we moved in. Mosul is awash with Iraqi rebels now. Samarra, which the U.S. made a lot of noise about clearing out a few weeks before Fallujah, became a center of unrest again once the U.S. troops moved on and turned it over to shaky Iraqi government forces.
So now we own a bombed-out Iraqi city, one that, having strewn with rubble, we will pay to rebuild. But the Iraqi rebellion doesn’t appear any weaker. At what point will our leaders get their heads around the simple fact that our enemies here have no back to break? Isn’t this the starting point in fighting a guerrilla war? Didn’t we learn anything from Vietnam?
Our idiocy is not just wasting American lives and money; it is telegraphing to our enemies that we are clueless. Because the same lesson from Fallujah — that we are fighting an unconventional enemy with no “back” to break — applies to the larger war on terrorism. And until we learn it we have no hope of winning.
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