Al-Qaeda-Linked Force Captures Fallujah Amid Rise In Violence In Iraq [Liberated Fallujah Falls!!]

Leave them to it. We blew it. Civilization cannot deal with barbarians AND a terrorist in the wh.

Aarently when Obie got Al-Qaeda “on the run”, it was running back into town rather than away from it.

"Al Qaeda is on the run!"

(0bama lies)

"Al Qaeda has been decimated!"

(0bama lies)

"Al Qaeda is on its heels!"

(0bama lies)

If the fall of Singapore to the Japanese metaphorically marked the eclipse of the British Empire in the eyes of colonials like Nehru, the fall of Falluja marks the eclipse of the Bush foreign policy and the final unarguable end of trading American lives, limbs and treasure for an illusion.

To place the blame on Obama would not be incorrect but it would be to do a great disservice to understanding America's dilemma and the state of the world. If Obama had not sold out the American adventure in Iraq, time would have accomplished the same. The fault is not just in Obama who is hostile to American interests around the world, the fault was in a misguided policy.

We are in a world war against militant Islam which uses terrorism and infiltration of the Arab world as well as the Christian world as primary weapons. Fighting a land war which unavoidably costs casualties to a society unwilling to see its own blood shed, is a policy which ultimately cannot prevail over time. Worse, invading Iraq has nothing to do with protecting the homeland from terrorists and had the unintended consequence of generating an Arab spring which is turned into an Arab nightmare.

The whole of American foreign policy has to be reconsidered and, after Obama, redirected.

We agree. Bush went in on the side od the saudis. alibama switched sides to iran. We should never have been there and just allowed them to continue killing each other. But before bush, there was bill and Kosovo. bush pushed for yet another islamic state born out of a false narrative of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which clinton perfected. It all ties in with whose shoes we were kissing, and now there is not anything we can do because we have allowed islam to expand and infiltrate literally every country on earth.

If Obama had not sold out the American adventure in Iraq, time would have accomplished the same.

I'm inclined to agree. I had hopes that the external enemy in Iran would help press the divergent elements in Iraq together, and for a time it actually did. Unfortunately no Iraqi George Washington ever appeared, and that sort of thing is a rarity in any case.

I have stated repeatedly that our involvement in Iraq bought time in the overall strategic battle against Islamic militancy, due to the attrition to the enemy command structure, lines of communication, and ability to recruit that took place between 2003 and 2007, perhaps an estimated 10-20 years before it would fully recover, or so I hoped. It has been seven, and Iraq is not yet lost, nor have al Qaeda and others yet fully recovered. That's the good news.

The bad is that I didn't anticipate a foreign policy package quite as disastrous as that of the 0bama administration. We didn't actually lose Iraq in country - recall that 0bama's reduction in combat forces there was actually six months behind Bush's optimistic projections. Where we lost Iraq (if we have yet) was in indecisive and counterproductive actions elsewhere: Libya, Egypt, Israel policy, Iranian nuclear negotiations, involvement in Syria; all of these served to revitalize al Qaeda's recruitment efforts. It revitalized the regional clout of Russia and Iran as well. In essence, 0bama's ideology, his inexperience, and his State Department squandered back the time that had been purchased in blood.

Nevertheless, I have hope that the momentum Islamic militancy has partially regained may be met with a firm stance in the future. But that is at least three years away, and it isn't looking particularly encouraging at the moment.

We could hope that the innate need for conflict in these people would be turned inward in the absence of an American enemy.

There were essentially two assumptions which provided the rationale for the Iraq war: 1) Iraq was at or near the acquisition of atomic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction which it might pass off to terrorists groups who would use them against Israel and infiltrate them into America causing vast carnage in the homeland; 2) Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who had so oppressed virtually every minority in his country that his removal would clear the way for the human spirit to prevail and democracy under American tutelage, reminiscent of our occupation of Germany and Japan, would bloom.

Both of these assumptions were proved by history to have been misconceived. The first got us into the war and the second kept us in the war. Why did we make war in reaction to a terrorist assault committed by only 19 individuals armed only with box cutters? Because we felt that the next attack would we with weapons of mass destruction generated in Iraq. Because we felt that Iraq shared our basic cultural assumptions, our belief in the yearning of the human spirit for democracy and the rule law. Again, these beliefs were misplaced.

Once it was determined that Iraq did not harbor weapons of mass destruction, the rationale for the war had to be the democratization of the country. We learned that democracy is more than majority rule, it requires as a predicate at least a culture of respect for the rule of law. We were thinking as people who drew upon the heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition, modified by the enlightenment. The Arab world has nothing to do with these traditions and wants no part of them.

Our efforts at democracy in these lands might be characterized as trying to teach a dog to speak English. It is not in his nature. The problem is not the odd dictator, the dictator is the symptom of the culture of Islam. The culture of Islam is the problem, the dictator is the symptom. Worse, superstition, brutality, victimology, paranoia, mob violence, intolerance, and murder are ingrained deep in this culture which erupts like a virus to attack opportunistically.

It is questionable whether it is more absurd to believe that invading and occupying an Arab country will somehow deter 19 more suicidal maniacs with box cutters, or is it more unrealistic to believe that we can impose Jeffersonian democracy on a medieval culture?

This is a culture with 1.6 billion adherents and we were undone by only 19 of them with box cutters. It led us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time, it bled our treasury, it wounded our military and in the process we empowered Iran and lost most of the Middle East. We can go on trying to teach this old dog new tricks, to attempt to teach Islam to think the way we do, we can employee bribery, appeasement, conventional war, drone strikes, national technical means, and a whole series of tactics and strategies but we are up against Islam.

Islam is not a religion but it is religion and politics combined but, more, it is in epistemology, a way of seeing the world which simply does not compute by our lights. It's not just anti-scientific and superstitious, it operates on a whole different set of assumptions about reality. We did not lose Falluja because we pulled our troops out too soon or because of some other tactical error, we lost Falluja in the seventh century. That which is true of Falluja is exponentially more true in Afghanistan. But it is true in places in the Arab/Muslim world that we once thought were relatively enlightened like Turkey and Egypt. There is enough of Islam in these places to affect the culture.

Our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan hit a wall because we were operating in different centuries. Can you imagine preaching toleration between Catholics and Protestants along the Rhine River during The 30 Years War in the 17th century and seeing how far we would get with a message that virtually everyone in America today accepts? It simply would not be heard. The culture was not ready. We would be lucky if we were not murdered on the spot by both sides.

Our job is to find ways to fight this war which will succeed and which we can afford. Some tactics like national technical means have produced more success than conventional land wars but the real problem is a looming internal implosion in America which will bankrupt us and leave us defenseless abroad. Our fiscal profligacy at home threatens to bring down the entire American experiment and render American military power weak. We are hollowing out our economy with pointless excursions against Islam while the threat from China, which requires an entirely different and more expensive response, grows apace.

We must rethink everything.

Our most effective course would be to set Sunni against Shiite and destabilize their efforts as much as possible

Iraq sent its WMD inventory to Syria prior to the start of OIF.

A mile stone! Here’s a thought all you spineless, commie rat bastards in control, what about all the service people who layed down thier lives, thier familes wives and children left behind to liberate just this one town? All for what? We are being used and tossed in the garbage bin

I am curious as to why a wordsmith such as yourself would refer to America as the homeland. I have disliked the word since Shrub first uttered it.

Is it a European term?

” Fighting a land war which unavoidably costs casualties to a society unwilling to see its own blood shed, is a policy which ultimately cannot prevail over time. Worse, invading Iraq has nothing to do with protecting the homeland from terrorists and had the unintended consequence of generating an Arab spring which is turned into an Arab nightmare.”

Agree with you on first statement (brilliant)
Disagree on the rest.

In 2002, Bush's taking the fight against terrorism to a 2 front war was not a flawed strategy.

The strategic question after attacking al Qaeda in Afghanistan was whether they would stay fight and die there, or flee and set up again somewhere else. It was correctly assessed that al Qaeda’s leadership would flee and find shelter under another regime- the most likely and deadly to our interests being Iraq and Saddam Hussein, whose flouting of Western sanctions had proven highly successful and emboldening to him. Petraeus pulled it out in Iraq, did a brilliant job after applying lessons learned and implementing a surge - and his success then so threatened the treacherous US democrat party that they, with our pwnded media, feverishly campaigned successfully to a war weary and information deprived US on Iraq's costs to end the war - and then when it was convenient, they also ended the career of Petraeus

It was obama’s treachery against his own country, his world apology tour to bash America to Egyptian students at al Azhar University n Egypt, his calls to and covert adminstration contacts with radical islamists and the muslim brotherhood to “community organize” against the pro-Western regimes in Egypt and even Libya (Qadaffi, while a wild card, had turned over his covert nuclear program to the West and begun seeking closer ties)...this is what led to the destructive “Arab spring”, a US betrayal of the very idealists and reformers obama claimed (lied about) to be trying to inspire. The world should have seen this when Obama ignored and thus condemned the attempted social uprising against extremists led by students and the middle class in Iran.

Better off with Saddam?

My EXACT thoughts.

Fallujah was never "liberated".

There were two times in the "war" on terror when I seriously proposed (and would have used) nuclear weapons, and April 2004 in Fallujah was one of 'em (Tora Bora December 2001 was the other).

Once Bush chose door #2, as I thought he would, the possibility of victory evaporated. And, in war, the opposite of victory is not schools for girls, the opposite of victory is defeat, which is now well underway.

Better off with Saddam?

Absolutely better off.

If any state leaders were going to be killed, we should have started with King Fahd and President Musharraf. But that was unnecessary.

If, as should have been done, OBL and his crew were vaporized at Tora Bora by 4 W-80 warheads, Saddam would have become our very best friend the very next day.

And, once he became our very best friend the very next day, he would have eradicated every trace of AQ thinking in Iraq in about a week, at zero cost to us in blood or treasure.