April 27, 2004, 8:40 a.m.
Focus on Fallujah
Ceasefires? How about victories?

The picture on page 19 of the Monday Washington Post nearly broke my heart. It showed two Marines, their heads bowed in prayer, at a Sunday open-air Mass held on the outskirts of Fallujah. They have been there, on the line, for too long. Held back and under fire, the strain on them is palpable. Part of the essence of the warriors' creed is that they will die for their country, trusting that their lives may be spent but not wasted. We are in the process of wasting some of these precious lives in a tactical situation that is unacceptable by any measure. We're extending a phony "ceasefire" while Marines are fighting and dying.

On Sunday Gen. Mark Kimmet — our chief military spokesman in Iraq — announced that our effort to end the insurgency in Fallujah and capture or kill the barbarians who killed and mutilated four Americans almost a month ago is now on a "political track." Several groups of Marines began walking down that political track in Fallujah on Monday with Iraqi Governing Council units. At this writing, there is heavy fighting in Fallujah, and the Marines are taking casualties. At least one Marine has died. One mosque — where the insurgents have been storing weapons and from which snipers have been firing on the Marines — has been hit, knocking down its minaret. Civilian casualties are likely to be heavy, because we didn't force the evacuation of women, children and the elderly before the Marines went in. We have done precisely the wrong thing when the right one was in our grasp.

Even the normally levelheaded Fox News Channel immediately launched into speculation about the mosque strike, asking whether the Arab world will see this as a "war crime." Of course it will, because we are responsible, and because anything we do will be so labeled by al-Jazeera and the rest. But that's nonsense because any place — mosque, hospital, school — is a legitimate military target when the enemy is using it for a military purpose. The worst of it is that we've waited too long to strike, and are allowing the insurgents to trap us into the house-to-house fighting Saddam wanted us to face in Baghdad. We can still avoid the trap. But the leadership in Iraq — Bremer and army old-think generals — will have to be replaced before we can.

The way to fight that political battle is to win the military battle first and have an ally among the clerics who will speak out to condemn what the terrorist insurgents are doing. Why, after a year, do we lack even one such ally? Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority have been in place for a year. The failure to obtain any support from the most prominent Iraqi Shia cleric, Ali al-Sistani, is a failure of historic proportion. Our failure to impose security, and Bremer and our army generals' decision to operate our occupation as a garrison force, rather than a constant presence (as the Marines and the Brits have done in the areas they are responsible for) has bred fear, not calm. Even before the mosque strike happened, U.N. envoy Lakdar Brahimi was saying that "there is no military solution" to the Fallujah mess. As the Wall Street Journal's editorial page has said, all this can be taken as evidence that America wants out of Iraq on almost any terms. That's the recipe for defeat with which we are all too familiar.

The future of Iraq cannot be won on this political track. We are adrift, and our enemies are taking full advantage of it. One of my pals, an active duty military intellectual whose name I cannot use, sent me a message last weekend. Part of it says:

We are struggling to tip toe through the tulips in Fallujah when it is no longer possible to do so. Fallujah should already have been an object lesson that if handled decisively and quickly would make further operations in the south unnecessary. We have lost the equivalent of two marine infantry companies precisely because of our over-reliance on light infantry again. Sad for the parents' whose sons have died valiantly, but needlessly. Now, we are poised to sacrifice whatever good will remains in the Shiite population by making war on a cleric who until recently was a minor player. If we go into Najaf, we will enrage Shiite Arabs, Persians, Pathans and Punjabis unnecessarily. I sincerely hope we just quietly withdraw from Najaf and finish the problem in Fallujah instead. Fallujah is a better place to make clear what will happen to anyone who threatens or challenges US authority. We should leave the firebrand cleric to his superiors in the Shiite hierarchy.

Harsh words? No, just a dose of reality and good advice. Damnit, we are in a war. American lives are not expendable along a "political track" that leads to the appearance of order in Iraq and not its reality. We need to get ourselves back on a track that leads to victory, not a false U.N.-blessed "legitimacy."

As this is being written, American troops are repositioning themselves in apparent preparation for a strike into Najaf, one of Iraq's holiest sites where the prophet Mohammed's son is believed to have died. Terrorist cleric Moqtada Sadr's "mahdi militia" is there, surrounding their leader and preparing the religious trap for us to enter. It matters not whether we capture Sadr this week, this month, or this year. What matters is that we provide security for the population of Iraq, which means we have to destroy the insurgents. We can't talk them out of their ideology or their weapons. We have to defeat them decisively, and end the Iranian, Syrian, and other foreign support on which they depend. We need to start with Fallujah and elsewhere, and get the Iraqis ready to do it themselves in Najaf.

We could have, and should have, made a full-out attack on Fallujah two weeks ago. The longer we wait, the more casualties our men suffer while the Iranian, Syrian, and other imported terrorists entrench themselves among the innocents there. Our military operations should proceed without regard to damage to the city, only taking care avoid inflicting casualties on the noncombatants. This can still be done, by requiring the women, children, and elders to leave now, and then use the full force we have available to kill the insurgents. No more ceasefires anywhere, please, until the insurgents are beaten decisively.

Defense Department sources say that more is going on in Fallujah than meets the eye. I hope so. But what is going on — in the eyes of the Marines there, not yours and mine — is what is important.

— Jed Babbin, an NRO contributor, is author of the forthcoming book, Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe are Worse than You Think.

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