Fallujah ... again

As major combat begins in Fallujah, it's worth remembering that this is a fight we've already fought:

[The Atlantic, in June:]After the assault on Fallujah the Marines ultimately ended up handing the city over to the "Fallujah Brigade," an Iraqi force charged with keeping order and rooting out the insurgents. How effective do you think the Iraqi unit is likely to be? Do you think turning Fallujah over to the Iraqis was the right decision?

[Robert Kaplan:]No. Masked gunmen are now in control of the place, according to The Washington Post. Marines had a victory stolen from them because of policy incoherence at the highest levels of our government. Still, the Marines have been accomplishing a lot since they left Fallujah. They've gone some way toward pacifying Al-Karmah, which is a major town strategically located between Baghdad and Fallujah, and one of the most hostile in the Sunni triangle. They've also been engaged in mortar mitigation. If mortars continue to rain on American bases in Iraq to the degree that they have, it may only be a matter of time before a 1983 Beirut style incident occurs, in which 241 servicemen were killed. So it's not as if they haven't spent the time usefully. In any case, even Fallujah is somewhat of a sideshow compared to the Shiite holy cities of the south. We can afford to make compromises of convenience in the Sunni triangle that we can't in the south. If we lose the south, we lose the war. And it's impossible for the U.S. to be any more aggressive in the south than it already has.

Kaplan's piece "Five Days in Fallujah" is a good take on the strange balance between American politics, fighting the Iraqi insurgency, and coexisting with Iraqi culture. But it's also frustrating to read because it reinforces that this isn't a fight we should be fighting again:

I went out into the city to see Captain Smith several times. As Bravo advanced westward, the forward headquarters moved from the garage to a small warehouse with hardened cement walls. Smith directed a Bravo platoon to the "905-degree grid," a few blocks to the west. Fallujah had been transformed into an American urban space. Points on the map were identified not by local landmarks but by their GPS grids. Streets had been given American names. Contact points with the enemy were color-coded. I followed Smith and Byrne to "Violet," an intersection where Alpha would link up with Bravo, and where the commercial part of southern Fallujah edged into the residential part. Here Bravo intended to go "firm" for a while—to dig in and establish yet another forward headquarters.

We were now about a hundred yards from the point of contact with the enemy. Two Marine M1A1 Abrams tanks stood fifty feet away. We all crouched against a wall as bullets whizzed by. But as the Marines consolidated the position, the whistles turned to cracks, so we stood up and relaxed a bit. One Marine took a leak. Through binoculars could be seen men armed with RPG launchers and wearing black pajamas, surrounded by women and children, taunting us. Only the snipers tried to get shots off at them.

Byrne's Humvee pulled up, with Corporal Magdalin at the wheel. Byrne and Smith began conferring with the FOB over the battalion tac. Smith wanted to move the two tanks southward to draw enemy fire away from Bravo, allowing his men to further advance. But he did not have direct command over the tank unit, so the request had to "go up through staff" before the tanks right next to him could move. Eventually they did. Even here, in the midst of the battlefield, there was an issue with cumbersome management.

Moreover, Bravo and the other infantry companies were dangerously scattered throughout the southern half of the city—so much so that the enemy could easily infiltrate a large warren of streets to the rear, between Bravo's newly advanced position and the FOB about a mile to the southeast. The company commanders would deal with this problem by standing up nonstop nighttime satellite patrols, despite the sleep deprivation afflicting many Marines.

Another Marine battalion, the 3rd of the 4th, would arrive in a few days from western Iraq to assist 1/5 and 2/1. But that redeployment might conceivably make the Marines vulnerable in another part of their area of responsibility. A hundred and thirty thousand U.S. soldiers in Iraq were simply not enough to deal with a small fraction of that number of insurgents. It wasn't only because insurgencies, pace C. E. Callwell, arise from the soil itself, and thus have whole categories of advantages that a military force from the outside, alien to the culture, lacks. It was also because—as the large number of American troops near the Baghdad airport attested—the U.S. defense establishment was still organized for World War II and the Korean War, with too many chiefs at enormous rear bases, and too few Indians at the edges. In the weeks ahead the Marines at Fallujah would attempt to avoid large-scale bloodshed by seeking Iraqi surrogates to patrol the city. Such an expedient may provide a hint as to how the U.S. military will deal with Iraq as a whole.

Sorry for the long quotes, but I think they're telling. See comments if reading the whole article requires you to login.