“We haven’t imposed any terms at the moment, we’re just trying to get a cease-fire in place and we have asked the insurgents to stop attacking the Marines.”
“They didn’t do that yesterday, we had a number of attacks yesterday, so we proposed a different time for one today. What we are trying to do is simply get the forces to stop firing, have the insurgents stop firing on the Marines. And then we’ll have a delegation from the governing council go in and we’ll try to find out how we can proceed from there.”
Paul Bremer
ABC’s “This Week”
April 11 2004
Steve Gilliard on how the Assault on Fallujah is going for the Marines
Failure in Iraq
US Marines are sitting outside Fallujah, using a cease-fire to reenforce their two outnumbered battalions, and hoping that some Iraqis can decide to stop killing each other and them. Despite all the big talk of “surrender or die” US forces are essentially stuck a mile inside the city and unable to move father without calling in the big guns and air support.If a regular Iraqi battalion held the town, US forces would make short work of them. But the fact is that this is as much political as military and all the resistance has to do is kill Americans and hold on. They have turned one of the most hated towns in Iraq into a nationalist symbol across the country. The commanders tell the reporters one story, their unit movements say another.
One exmple, the use of the AC-130. That plane is never used in offensive operations. It can kill a football field’s worth of soldiers. No one can move forward when Spectre is above, unless they want to die. It is usually used when US forces are pinned down. Then, it can wipe an attacking enemy out. The fact that it was used in Fallujah indicates that their attack stalled out. Then, they had to call in more AF fighters, which means they were in serious trouble. Marines hate calling in the Air Force because they have a habit of killing Marines.
Then, of course, they bought up a third battalion. A full regiment of troops still stuck in that one mile area of Fallujah.
In no war game you could play, in no Lessons Learned, do you bring up another unit if your attack is going well. You do that when your other units are getting hammered.
What the US thought was that the guerillas would collapse and run deep in the city and the US can get the bad guys and call it a day. Well, the resistance in Fallujah turned out to be Iraqi Army vets who knew how to fight. Don’t let the causality figures fool you. Many of the Iraqi dead are civilans. I wonder how many guerillas are being killed. Remember that they don’t have helmets, body armor and armor. The fact that so many Americans are being killed is the stunner. 50 dead in one week is stunning. The guerillas are amazingly effective combatants.