Filibuster, the whole thing is that most of Iraq IS pacified... Most of the violence seems to be in this one town - they even said it themselves that it's the "graveyard for Americans". As Army Air Corps pointed out, we can rebuild and name the streets after the Iraqis who help.
Most of Iraq WANTS a peace and a democracy. The people who populate Fullujah are the enemies of not only U.S., but the majority of Iraq.
Peace through strength.
And like I said. This has nothing to do with whether you supported the war or not in the first place. This has to do with what is now and where we are now and how we can get out of this with the least amount of U.S. casualities as possible.
God bless our troops!! Always!!!
Billy
In the first place, the Sunni Triangle is generally anti-American. According to the latest poll, only 30% of Iraqi Arabs view US troops favorably - compared to nearly 90% of Kurds - and it doesn't even take the Sunni-Shia disparity into account, so it's safe to say the
majority of Sunni Arabs oppose our military presence. A significant minority of Sunnis - I'd say 25-30 percent - approve of anti-coalition attacks even if they don't participate in them. Level Fallujah and there's a pretty large pool of new insurgents for our enemies to draw from.
If, as I personally suspect, this whole thing was organized by foreign Islamists collaborating with foreign Arab media (how on earth were TV cameras so conveniently nearby when the attack took place?), their probable intent in such a highly-publicized atrocity was to provoke us into taking just the kind of action you propose. As far as they're concerned, their struggle's pretty dull without US troops causing collateral damage to Iraqi civilians in destroying them.
Fallujah's population is 250,000. I'd say at most 5% is involved in attacks in any fashion. The reason it's a particularly troublesome spot - even in comparison to other places in the Sunni triangle - is the population is particularly anti-American after last April's shooting incident.