Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Fallujah Thoughts

Apparently the insurgents have largely abandoned Fallujah, given the weak resistance we have found there.
So what does this mean for our conquest, excuse me, liberation of Fallujah?
Well, we are still getting heavier-than-normal fatalities, so the insurgents have not entirely abandoned the city. I think the key to seeing how much they have abandoned it, though, is not only in the rate at which casualties or fatalities occur, but in how quickly we take the city. Even if they had stayed, we probably wouldn't be getting more than 10-15 soldiers killed per day, but the offensive would last for two or three weeks rather than, as it looks to be shaping up, no more than five days (obviously, the long-term pacification will take longer, but I'm referring to the initial taking control of the city, i.e. being able to move our troops through all of the major areas).
Of course, looking more closely at the fatalities, a lot of them occurred outside of Fallujah, so maybe I am wrong and there are few casualties in Fallujah, indicating an even more thorough abandonment of the city by anti-American forces than I had assumed.
In any case, I have a feeling that we may see the death toll for Nov. 8 and 9 increase over the next few days as reports of casualties work their way through the system; i.e. there may have been many casualties that occurred a day or two ago that have not yet been reported or confirmed.
In any case, my prediction that we would have more than 100 coalition hostile deaths this month (25 so far) may not turn out to be accurate, as the resistance in Fallujah was so much less than anticipated. I'll have to try to look over all of my predictions, but unless there is significant resistance waiting for us over the next day or so, I think that I'll have to revise all of them (which is, of course, an admission that I was incorrect).
In any case, though, I would think that we would kill at least 500 Iraqi civilians in this assault (although we may never be given an accurate number) and we will also destroy a lot of the infrastructure of Fallujah, thus turning more of the population of Iraq against us.
Although the war-cheerleaders don't seem to get it, that is part of the insurgents' plan: get the US to cause enough damage to turn the populace against us. Classic guerilla tactics, but most pro-warriors either don't consider this or assume that the Iraqis affected by this will blame the insurgents and not us, because, you know, the Iraqis are on our side, you know, and like, are, like, armchair generals like us, who, you know, like, look at this whole thing as a giant game of, like, Risk, the way, like, that we do, okay?

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