I believe you and I agree this action should have taken place in April. I was sorry it didn't turn out that way. I would agree with your assessment regarding how the enemy saw our decision not to confront them then.
Their opinion of the matter doesn't matter all that much to me, as far as whether we lost or not. We didn't. It matters to me because I agree that it probably implied to them that we didn't have the gonads to confront them. That probably encouraged them.
Perceptions are important. I believe we'd have been a lot further along if we would have sanitized Fallujah early on, then moved on to sanitize other areas as well.
We need to take it to the areas where the idiots are operating from. And we need to do that today. As soon as the elections are over, I hope this takes place.
Thanks for the comments. I think we're pretty much on the same page, although we may express it somewhat differently.
You just hit the nail on the head -- our failure to follow through back in April emboldened the enemy in Fallujah and radical Islamists throughout the Middle East. We made a strategic blunder by allowing ourselves to be perceived as weak, indecisive, and afraid of a bloody urban battle. We corrected the mistake in a big way, and must now keep driving the right message.