Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City

City Journal ^ | April 14, 2008 | Michael Totten

[Nony]

Fallujah is strange, sullen, wild-eyed, badass, and just plain mean,” writes Bing West in his 2005 war chronicle No True Glory. “Fallujans don’t like strangers, which includes anyone not homebred. Wear lipstick or Western-style long hair, sip a beer or listen to an American CD, and you risk the whip or a beating.” Fallujah has been Iraq’s bad-boy city since at least the time of the British in Mesopotamia; even then, travelers were warned to stay out. More recently, Saddam Hussein recruited some of his regime’s most ruthless officers from Fallujah. Even though it was a quieter city than most in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, with less looting than in Baghdad and a staunchly pro-American mayor, the Americans should have known that Fallujah was trouble.

[DogBarkTree]

Outstanding! Post of the day I must say. Well worth the read. This is how he will win the war throughout the whole damn area.

[DogBarkTree]

"In an Iraqi child’s drawing, American might slays the monstrous insurgency."

[Moose4]

Money quote IMO:

“They will emulate you, gents,” one American officer says to his men. “They. Will. Emulate you. Why? Because we came over here twice and kicked their ass."

}:-)4

[Larebil]

“writes Bing West in his 2005 war chronicle No True Glory”

I am reading this now, fascinating read.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This needs more reads...

[Fred Nerks]

Many Fallujans initially welcomed Zarqawi and his lieutenants as liberators from the hated American occupiers. But the jihadists did not fight for freedom. Instead, they enforced Islamic law at the point of a gun, establishing a brand of fascism even worse than Saddam’s. They murdered sheikhs who opposed them. They butchered their enemies’ families, burning women alive and slashing children’s throats with kitchen knives, and massacred other families for accepting food from Marines. City officials, tribal authorities, police officers—anyone in charge of anything was targeted for destruction.

The Fallujans got a taste of sharia and didn't like it? Good. Something like that must have been going on in Basra. I saw a short YouTube video in which men dressed in taliban fashion were beating up Iraqi male civilians selling beer at a market and destroying their only means of livelyhood. One of the wives, crying, was translated as saying; 'we have not eaten any food today, my children are hungry, what are they doing to us, this is no better than when we had Saddam'.

[G8 Diplomat]

“When you join the al-Qaida organization, the first thing you have to do is get your parents far away from your mind,” an Iraqi police officer tells me.

Some kids will say the same thing about going to college.

[G8 Diplomat]

That was a cool article. Fallujans got a glimpse of AQ rule and Shariah and hated it so much they had to turn to the American infidels! !ممتاز

[neverdem]

Thanks, bfl

[freema]

I wouldn’t say we lost that first battle - rather I would say they hadn’t quite had their fill of ‘ugly’, and as such it was a case of let them eat cake. I would then pontificate that it wasn’t so much a bitter taste of AQ as the sweet taste of freedom that followed.

[Girlene]

The barriers don’t merely separate the city from the rest of Iraq; they separate neighborhoods from one another, too. Foot traffic isn’t restricted, but no one can drive from one neighborhood to another without passing through a police checkpoint. Smuggling weapons is prohibitively difficult. Anyone who wants to set off a car bomb will have to content himself with blowing up his own neighborhood. The walls are a major hassle, but they work. Fallujah’s most recent car bomb exploded last July.

Sounds like it's working!

[Marine_Uncle]

The first battle really did not become much of anything. One small Marine Patrol got hammered. Most of our Marines where on the perimeter of the city on points of the compass. My nephew was in the south eastern perimeter and his guys did no fighting whatsoever. We must remember the Iraqi government begged our forces to not turn it into a full scale battle. Our forces withdrew in short without putting down the hammer.
Obviously the second round, was an entirely different engagement.