Fallujah - Old errors meant assault became inevitable

[PSU84]

Old errors meant assault became inevitable

By Justin Huggler The Independent London, UK 10 November 2004

There was something familiar in the reports from Fallujah yesterday. Just as during the invasion of Iraq last year, television pictures provided drama, but little hard information. Nobody was sure how the American assault was going. A city still packed with civilians has been subjected to a withering assault of US air strikes and artillery. Street-to-street fighting was still a very real prospect last night. But outside the Arab world, international criticism of the US attack on the city was unexpectedly muted. There was a sense among many observers that this latest ratcheting of Iraq's agony had become inevitable.

The Americans painted themselves into a corner. The mistakes that led to yesterday's fighting were made long ago, in the invasion of Iraq and the woeful failure to administer the country afterwards. The Americans could not stand by as the country descended ever further into anarchy. The insurgents are able to operate at will. The beheadings of Westerners and Iraqis who work for the West has wrecked any vestigial hope of rebuilding the country. The last aid agencies are fleeing. Unless the Americans were to admit defeat and leave - which they won't, yet - they had to try to strike back at the insurgents. Fallujah's defiance has come to symbolise the insurgency, and it appears to have become a base for foreign militants such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian al-Qa'ida ally who is blamed for many of the beheadings.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=581297