November 9, 2004 - In April 2004, two months before the American Occupation handed modified sovereignty over to a provisional Iraqi government the US Marines had put Fallujah under siege and were poised to retake the city from the Sunni resistance that had taken control of it. The word came from Washington to stand down. US forces would not enter the city. Washington would not permit the inevitable images of urban warfare and its casualties to taint the President’s re-election campaign.

The President’s man in Baghdad, J. Pail Bremer cobbled together a deal. US forces would lift the siege, permit travel in and out of the city and would withdraw to bases on the perimeter. The job of policing Fallujah would be turned over to something called the Fallujah Brigade made up of the very fighters who had been firing on Marine patrols. The Brigade was armed with captured weapons and put under the command of experienced officers who had served with Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard. The deal and the Fallujah Brigade disintegrated almost as soon as it was made. Fallujah became a no-go zone for American troops – Indian Country.

For eight months the inevitable battle to control the city of 300,000 was deferred while the election campaign spun out. For eight months the alliance of convenience between Ba`athist loyalists, Iraqi nationalists and pan-Arab jihadists strengthened its hold on Fallujah, preparing to receive the assault that they, and the US commanders on the ground knew was bound to come. Domestic politics were again overriding military tactics just as domestic politics had overridden military judgment in Vietnam. Fallujah would have to wait while occasional air strikes punished the city.

On November 3rd the last barrier to an assault on Fallujah was removed. President Bush claimed his re-election victory and the Marines started their last minute rehearsals for the attack. Sunday Interim Prime Minister Allawi gave the “order” granting his permission for the assault to proceed and 10,000 Marines and troops from the Army’s First Infantry Division led the drive to restore law and order to the city and root out the resistance that had been given eight months to prepare for the assault that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the key to American success in Iraq in remarks yesterday while he warned that a victory in Fallujah would not mean an end to Iraqi resistance.

As if to underline to Secretary’s words the resistance attacked the Black Watch forward base at Camp Dogwood some 30 miles south of Baghdad. One more member of that storied regiment was killed. While the preparations for the reduction of Fallujah went on the resistance struck in Samarra, near Kirkuk, in Ramadi, and in the streets of Baghdad. For months the Administration has said that Fallujah was at the center of what it has described as Abu Musa Zarqawi’s terrorist network. Yesterday Secretary Rumsfeld said he did not know where the Jordanian, who replaced Bin Laden as the terrorist boogieman of the day, was located.

Today the tragedy of Fallujah is being played out. US GIs are fighting street to street and house to house in an urban battle the like of which we have not seen since February 1968 in Hue. Air strikes and artillery rounds are bouncing the rubble as we fight to destroy Fallujah in order to save it. It is the American Way.