Fallujah catches its breath

Indeed, in analyzing the war it is exceedingly difficult to generalize about anything, and at times it seems as if all knowledge gained here is contingent and, in some strange way, as tribal as the Iraqis themselves, bound by the geography. Tactics that work in one city almost never directly translate to another. The extent to which the lessons of Fallujah, a predominantly Sunni town, can be applied to the rest of the ethnically divided nation is unclear. It is also possible, as other officers indicated, that what I saw in Fallujah was that the insurgents have simply shifted their operations outside the city, as evidenced by the rise in insurgent attacks in the neighboring town of Karma and elsewhere.

But in the meantime, many fewer people are dying in Fallujah, and children are able to ride their brightly decorated bikes down the half-rubbled streets. Looking at the overall fact pattern, Fallujah and much of the rest of Anbar province begins to look a lot like Tal Afar in 2004, the first city to be successfully pacified in a well-publicized counterinsurgency campaign conducted by Army Col. H.R. McMaster, in which a dangerous, restive town was quickly won over by focusing on the needs of the local population. In a similar way as Tal Afar, Fallujah today seems at first to be an anomaly, an island of hope in a country gone to hell.

But such a characterization overlooks several key facts. Fallujah and the rest of Anbar are considerably larger than Tal Afar, encompassing the entire western third of Iraq and representing upward of 800,000 Iraqis. Only a year prior, Anbar was the deadliest province in all of Iraq, a fact that grants it a symbolic value in success that Tal Afar enjoyed on a lesser scale and only in retrospect. And Fallujah had been written off by some Marine intelligence officers as unredeemable.

Nevertheless, it's a precarious peace that has taken hold. During a conversation with Lt. Col. Mullen in his quarters one afternoon, he worried about the unit scheduled to replace 2/6 in October, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, current members of which have been implicated in the 2006 murder of an Iraqi man near the town of Hamdania. (I served in 3/5 myself a decade ago.) Mullen was concerned because 3/5 had fought in the battle of Fallujah and had a reputation for being very aggressive. "I don't think there's many veterans of the battle left in the battalion," he said, his voice trailing off. He didn't go on to say it, but I suspect we were both thinking the same thing: It would take only one IED attack and a gross overreaction by Marines to reverse all that has been achieved in Fallujah. A unit takes casualties and in response detains scores of innocent Iraqis who happen to be in the area, or perhaps even worse, and a year's worth of local goodwill is squandered.

Another major concern for the future of Fallujah is the fledgling police force, which does the lion's share of the security work for the city. In the past, the local police have acted as little more than a tribal posse with scant respect for the citizenry or for the rule of law. By arming and abetting the police in Fallujah, there is no guarantee that they will behave in a manner we might expect from an American police force. The Marines are well aware of this situation and the American advisory team that is assigned to train the Fallujah police force has a series of classes scheduled to address this. When I asked Lt. Col. Mullen about the long-term efficacy of the local police, he asserted, "Security is the precondition for everything in Iraq, so you've got to go with the resources you have in front of you in order for other areas to develop."

However, it is this very issue of empowering groups of Sunnis that is reportedly a major point of contention between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (a Shiite) and Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and the man whose charge from President Bush is assessing the state of the war by mid-September. And for the long term, there seems to be little evidence that the various police forces scattered across Anbar, which enjoy good local credibility, will be able to integrate themselves into anything resembling a national law enforcement system.

The Marines here are not given to flights of optimism about Iraq as a whole. The idea of "fighting them over here so we don't have to fight them in Pasadena" is like so much old rot to them, belonging like "weapons of mass destruction" to the lexicon of a bygone era. Absent as well is the high-octane "bringing peace and democracy" rhetoric that was so in vogue at the beginning of the Iraq adventure. What they have instead is a curiously restrained pride in the regional victory they have won -- knowing full well that in this protracted war, so riddled with policy failures, their achievement could easily be fleeting.

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