Fallujah catches its breath

Despite Bush's deceptive rhetoric and mishandling of the war, the Marines I rode with here have won a delicate peace in this once-deadly city.

By David J. Morris

Read more: George W. Bush, Politics, News, Iraq, Baghdad, Al Qaeda, Iraq War, fallujah

REUTERS/David Furst

A U.S. Marine stands near residents waiting to have a Fallujah resident badge issued at an office in Fallujah November 14, 2006.

Aug. 21, 2007 | FALLUJAH, Iraq -- I've been traveling throughout western Iraq for almost a month now and what I've seen so far has been shocking, but not in the way you might expect: Against all logic and expectations, against practically everything I've learned about the military's history of fighting insurgencies, parts of Iraq actually seem to be getting better. During the second week of August I spent five nights with a Marine platoon in downtown Fallujah, and after the typical harrowing Humvee ride in, wondering which pile of roadside trash might conceal the IED (improvised explosive device) that ended my life, I took off my body armor and didn't put it back on for the better part of a week. The only sounds of battle I heard were overzealous Iraqi policemen shooting at dogs (and generally missing, I might add).

Fallujah, once the symbol of everything gone wrong with the American mission in Iraq, seems to be breathing again. About half the shops are open. Groups of children wave heartily at American convoys driving by. Marines send out for local kebabs and falafel almost every night. The Marines haven't had anyone killed in action in over three months. According to Lt. Col. William Mullen III, the commander of the unit in charge of the city, the 2/6 (2nd Battalion, 6th Marines), "The enemy has not given up Fallujah, but he is on the ropes."

It feels strange reporting good news about Iraq these days. When the battalion's executive officer, Maj. George Benson, a lanky joke-a-minute officer from Virginia, first began telling me about the success story of the city -- the long lines of locals waiting to volunteer for the U.S.-sponsored neighborhood watch program, the police precinct system the Marines have created -- I was incredulous. My skepticism was hardly the major's fault. The Bush administration and the senior military leadership in Iraq have obfuscated and dissembled for so long about so many things to so many people (even themselves) that it is difficult at first to believe any optimistic conclusions.

One of the great difficulties of assessing the war is overcoming what some officers call the "soda straw effect," i.e., having a constricted view during travels but thinking that what you're seeing somehow represents the entirety of the country. Practically every officer I spoke with in the Fallujah area admitted that the Marines have benefited from a near perfect storm of circumstances that has allowed them to pacify what was, in 2004, the deadliest city in the entire country. Although the senseless brutality of local Salafist insurgents dwindled after a bloody U.S. offensive here in 2004, it has never disappeared entirely. To give a more recent and particularly odious example, in May insurgents drove a car bomb into the funeral procession for a local policeman who had been loyal to the U.S., killing at least 20 civilians. Yet attacks like these, which have alienated the local populace, have been a catalyst for the recent Marine gains in the city. As Lt. Col. Mullen put it, "It's as much about exploiting the enemy's mistakes as it is about what the Marines are doing out there."

In three trips to Iraq since 2004 I've learned that whatever the officers say, you have to listen to what the streets tell you as well. Night after night, as I heard the occasional Kalashnikov rifle shot rising from the boulevard beneath our position, I kept waiting for the fire to build, for the return shots and the firefight that would bring our idyll in the city to a bloody end. But they never came.

The surprising success in Fallujah hasn't just fallen into the laps of the Marines, however. There is a relatively new operational strategy being worked out here, one that sees Iraq through a broader societal lens. Gone are the days of looking at the local populace merely as innocents caught in the crossfire. The new focus is on softer, less aggressive tactics against insurgents, including physically reconfiguring and walling off communities in an attempt to make them more secure (what some theorists have dubbed "the new military urbanism"), and employing local Iraqi security forces as proxies. The latter approach was used to great effect in Afghanistan after 9/11, where local militias were employed to fight the Taliban.

Discussing the evolution of the American strategy in Iraq, one officer told me, "2003 seems like a long time ago. We've had to change the way we do a lot of things over here." As Maj. Benson put it, "Our attitude used to be, 'We don't do windows'" [meaning the Marines don't do nation building]. On another occasion, as I stood looking into the heart of the city over a phalanx of concrete barriers -- one of which had the word "kill" spray-painted on it by a previous unit -- I asked Capt. Jeff McCormack, a company commander in 2/6 and a veteran of the November 2004 battle of Fallujah, if it had been difficult learning to see the city with new eyes. "Yeah," he said, looking past the spray-painted barrier. "It's been real hard." He gestured down the main avenue of town. "Over there is the 'hell house' where [Navy Cross winner] 1st Sgt. [Bradley] Kasal was wounded." Later, in the patrol base operations center, McCormack spoke almost regretfully about the Marine mind-set that dominated in the early stages of the war. "We used to bitch about having to do reports every time a local was killed. It was like, 'He was digging a hole by the side of the road. He was an idiot. He deserved it.'"

Now McCormack and his men puzzle over a raft of municipal issues such as ensuring that locals have access to electricity, clean water and gasoline. Whereas in past deployments Marine units would brag about the large numbers of locals they had detained, now the emphasis is on thorough police work and ensuring that anyone who is detained is sent properly through the nascent Iraqi justice system.

As Lt. Col. Mullen admitted to me later, in preparing for this deployment to Iraq he and his staff mounted what he described as "an information operation" (military-speak for propaganda) on the younger enlisted Marines in the battalion to force them to change their thinking about how to fight this war. "It's really not a kinetic [conventional military] fight. Having a squad basically go nuts like in Haditha -- which I think is what that will turn out to have been -- is extraordinarily destructive to our mission here." (Members from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines stand accused of slaughtering 24 civilians in the western Anbar town of Haditha in 2005 in what some war critics view as the Marines' own My Lai massacre.)

To be sure, Fallujah is not Baghdad, the Iraqi capital that in many ways now stands at the heart of the struggle to resolve the war. And there are reasons to be skeptical of the Bush administration's hype that the "surge" strategy is working. The broader picture of Iraq turned ominous again last week when a quadruple truck bombing in towns near the Syrian border took the lives of hundreds and wounded hundreds more in the single deadliest insurgent attack since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. On Monday, the governor of a southern Iraqi province was killed by a roadside bomb, the second provincial governor to be assassinated in August.

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