Word: fallujah
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Meanwhile, the Iraqi police and security forces to whom the U.S. had hoped to turn over more responsibility were proving barely competent. U.S. officers on the ground in Fallujah, Najaf and other hot spots warned of a level of training and coordination by rebel bands that kept U.S. troops tied down. Plus, there is no slack in U.S. force strength. "Everybody's committed," says an Army officer who has tracked U.S. troop levels in Iraq over the past year. "If civil war erupts between the Kurds and Sunnis, who goes there? There is nobody. How is it possible...
...comply. A showdown, he said, would come in "days, not weeks." Some former Pentagon officials are worried about the signal that deadline sent. "We've got to stop this business of getting up in front of the world and saying, 'We are going to do this in Fallujah,' and then we seem to back off the next day," says former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni. "In that part of the world, strength is respected greatly, and if you look weak, you're in trouble...
...FALLUJAH DILEMMA...
...troops in the world, it may not do any good against an enemy that's firing on you from inside ambulances and using children as human shields. Nowhere is the challenge of how to win the battle without losing the war as painfully visible as it is in Fallujah, where the Marines' siege entered its fourth week with both hopes for a resolution and fear of a bloodbath. The city of 200,000, 35 miles west of Baghdad, is the war's open sore. A Sunni stronghold, it has festered since the start of the occupation, when U.S. forces faced...
Many officers maintained that Fallujah had to be taken on eventually, and the ambush and mutilation of four U.S. security contractors in the city in March set the stage. The U.S. vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Marines surrounded the city, imposed a curfew and engaged in a pitched battle with what the White House now says could be as many as "a few thousand" insurgents. Hopes for a peaceful resolution fluttered when Iraqi civic leaders helped broker a cease-fire: if the insurgents would surrender their heavy weapons, the Marines would pull back from their cordon...