I'd like you to point to a battle in the past where an armed force attacking a city of a similar size took less casualties than our Marines have taken in recapturing Fallujah? An excellent point. History is being re-written as we speak. Historically, in a typical siege, the attackers can count on failing if their numerical superiority was less than 5 to one, and typically more like 10-20 to 1.
As far as I'm concerned I would be happy with 10,000 to 0 no matter what the name of the enemy is. I keep hoping. Specially when dealing with savages, who not only deliberately target non-participating civilians, but arrange to put their own women, children and helpless in harm's way for propaganda purposes. They deserve no chance to live. Zero, zip, nichts, rien, nichigo, nada.
Just as a comparison look at what happended during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where the Jewish resistence was compressed in a much smaller area and was much less well armed than the Fallujah thugs are and the Nazis were much more ruthless than the Marines have been in Fallujah. There, the Nazis admitted losing 15 people and suffering over 70 casualties in the fight to retake the Ghetto. This number however was believed to have substantially undercounted Nazis deaths casualties in order to not cause embarrassment to Himmler, whose people had been in charge of retaking the Ghetto. At the end of the uprising, which lasted over a month, the SS finally had to resort to burning down the Ghetto - but even that didn't kill off all of the defenders, so the Nazis ended up killing the last holdouts by gassing them
See Link