it sure the hell WASN'T the Marines, so...Could say much the same for Vietnam...
The Marines won Fallujah, handily, when allowed to.
Regards
it sure the hell WASN'T the Marines, so...I read on another thread that after the Blackwater incident, the marines were ordered to immediately assault Fallujah, bypassing shaping operations that would’ve allowed marines to evac some women and children.
I recommend to everyone the book “No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah” by Bing West.
It covers both the military and the political/media aspects.
Just an astounding book. Mistakes were made and always are in warfare/politics, but...the quality, dedication and toughness of our forces prevailed.
Media, the domestic enemy, the media.
The whole axiom is flawed for one very important reason: we needed to concentrate the enemy to fight them.
At the beginning of the WoT, our enemy was dispersed to every corner of the planet. It would be impossible for our military to “take the fight to them” in all those nations, and they would always have many advantages. They would even be able to take the fight to our homeland.
So the best way we could fight them was if we got them to concentrate in a place where our powerful military could fight them, far away from our “soft targets”. This would turn a situation from one where we couldn’t win to one where we couldn’t lose.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan acted as “roach motels”, drawing the very best the enemy had to fight with there, to fight our soldiers. Had they been smart, they would have stayed dispersed and attacked our civilians. But they took the bait.
It is important that not all of the enemy has the fortitude to leave their native country, get training and equipment, and travel all the way to get to us. So this meant that only their very best, their top fighters, left a dozen countries to come to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight us and die. And once they are gone, it will be a long time before there are enough of them with the chutzpah to try it again.
But Iraq and Afghanistan are both large nations. So once our enemy were in country, we needed to concentrate them even more. We chose the very hostile city of Fallujah to be this place. From a given moment, we wanted every enemy fighter to head there, so that we could kill them.
We knew that they would think Fallujah would be ideal as a place to set up their emirate, as the new capital of their conquest of Iraq. The Fallujahns fully supported them and hated the US, and had a long history of making trouble for foreigners.
So we *gave* the enemy Fallujah. And from every corner of Iraq, the enemy flowed there like water. And it was the biggest and best trap laid since World War II.
Perhaps the worst mistake al-Qaeda ever made, which says a lot, in that they are masters as screwing up. And for their bad judgment, the Fallujahns were punished mightily first by their al-Qaeda “friends”, and then by the US.
And over 1,350 enemy fighters died there. A crushing defeat to their forces. Had they stayed home and made trouble, by now there could be a dozen nations in the throes of a civil war.
The US military didn’t “lose” Fallujah, it “used” Fallujah.
I do know that the msm is firmly in the enemy camp and anything that they did was to help the enemy.
The build up of enemy forces was noted but not entirely acted upon until the offensive began. Our reaction was swift and deadly. All Viet Cong forces were eliminated and never again was a serious threat. NVA forces were stunned and sent back to safe areas in Cambodia and the north.
Who won the battle of Tet? Unquestionably a decisive military victory for the US. But the media manipulated (at the hands communists in the media, including Uncle Walter) and beat the citizens of this nation to death nightly with photos of dead and crying women and children and Dan Rather’s flat out lies about the war.
The only thing that kept this from being Tet all over again has been the real story coming out in the alternative media.
The enemies of freedom no longer have a strangle hold on the our information. We have freed the truth.