I believe it comes down to killing inplacable insurgents, or allowing them to constitute the authority of Fallujah, and set the example for other wannabes. We chose to let the insurgents win.
We will pay for this over and over and over....Islamofascists learn, and here they learned it is profitable to face us down in cities.
Also, it is inaccurate to compare Fallujah to Dresden. There were probably not enough remaining fighters to require the razing of the city. A few thousand more, by most accounts. Had we creatively engaged them, destroying the town was not necessary.
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.
"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.
I respectfully disagree with your analysis. We won't pay for it if we are not there. Most of these people are not Islamofascists. They were just people in a city...defending their city. Same as you would do if a foreign army invaded your city.
There were only a few hundred foreign terrorist types there, by the Marines own estimate. The rest were simply Fallujah citizens thinking that they were protecting their city.
What the article does not say is that the Marines did surround the area with the "bad guys" in it---we're only talking about 1/4 of the city---and engaged them repeatedly in skirmishes (just like Karbala and Najaf) that killed dozens, if not hundreds of them.
Bottom line, the Iraqi "insurgents" get to CLAIM whatever they want, but they know the reality that their "victory" was totally at the sufferance of the U.S. and that, as the one guy said, most of them wanted to live.
Just tonight, on Fox, there is an ex-general saying that we did not appreciate the depth of tribalism in Iraq, and that this seemed like a pretty good solution. He is by not means a weak-kneed lib: on the contrary, (sorry, I forgot his name) he thought this probably was the best we could hope for. "Will many of these rebels come back out and fight?" Brit Hume asked. "It's not clear they will," he said. Many were locals who just didn't want Americans there, but weren't opposed to a new Iraqi authority.
I find it interesting that the Marines, who everyone wanted to "go in" and "clean up," were the ones SUGGESTING these approaches and HAD TO GET PERMISSION FROM WASHINGTON to talk to these people. It's exactly the opposite of what the armchair generals here were saying---that Bush and Washington were pressuring them to negotiate.
The insurgents didn't win anything except the chance to be killed at a later time by our soldiers, and at one more fortuitous for our guys. Going into the town would have been much more dangerous for the Marines, and the Sadr thugs were beginning to lose any support they may have had in the town. The mullah, Sistani, had a 'come to Allah' meeting with al-Sadr and convinced him and his goons to leave town. That's when they went to Karbala and on to Najaf. In both successive places they didn't get support from the townspeople, who knew the Marines would be coming after Sadr again. Sadr is in a much more dangerous position now than he was in Fallujah, and our soldiers aren't dealing with a population that is angry for unnecessary destruction. Our guys don't want to destroy stuff; it only means they'd have to come back and help put it back up!