"Dresden, as you may recall, was a fire-bombing in which maximum civilian casualties were expected. My neighbor was a little girl evacuated to the hillsides outside Dresden, and watched the city and its inhabitants (including her parents) incinerated in a firestorm."
"That was not the prospect for Fallujah at any point."
It should have been.
As a Marine, you should know that the Marines officers learned in their officer training simulations that leveling cities, especially with large numbers of non-combatants, was a dead LOSER, and ultimately results in more dead Marines. Further, he noted that the officers studied the failed Russian heavy-handed approach at Grozny and learned how NOT to conduct urban warfare.