The general was speaking to American citizens at home, not the actual participants
It Doesn't End With Fallouja
November 22, 2004
A Marine general commented last week after his men ousted nearly all Iraqi guerrillas from Fallouja that the two weeks of fighting had "broken the back of the insurgency." If only it were that simple.
Marines did a good job of purging enemies from the city, but as the general spoke, flames and smoke rose in other Sunni Triangle cities in the north and west; foreigners and Iraqis were beheaded, shot or killed by suicide bombers; and political parties vowed to boycott national elections that the Bush administration has put forth as a harbinger of democracy in a nation where the concept is a stranger.
More than 50 U.S. soldiers were killed in the Fallouja fight, which began Nov. 8 in one of the cities where Sunni Muslims are the majority, and the U.S. death toll in Iraq has now passed 1,200. An estimated 1,200 insurgents were killed in Fallouja as well.
The difficulties of pacifying Iraq were obvious last week. Insurgents showed the depths to which they're capable of sinking when evidence surfaced that Margaret Hassan, the kidnapped director of CARE International in Iraq, had been shot to death. And even as Marines tried to kill the last remnants of resistance in Fallouja, guerrillas stormed police stations in the northern city of Mosul, where more than 80% of police responded by abandoning their posts.
