“‘We had to stop some operations until the [U.S.] elections were over,’ said a senior Iraqi Defense Ministry official who requested anonymity because he’s not an authorized spokesman. ‘The Iraqi government requested support from the American side in the past, but the Americans were reluctant to launch military operations because they were worried about American public opinion. Now, their hands are free.’” (Jonathan S. Landay and Hannah Allam, Bush expected to move quickly on Iraq, Knight Ridder)

“[Iraq is] a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse… The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take ten to fifteen years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population.” (Lt. Gen. William Odom, Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88)

So let the madness begin.

In his first post-election press conference, our President said, “You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style… and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is — you’ve heard the agenda: Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.”

So brace yourself, because we are evidently on the eve of the spending of more than a little of that “capital” in Falluja. As I write, perhaps 10,000 American troops are at the edges of that recalcitrant city in the heartland of Sunni Iraq, supported by small numbers of recently trained, untrusted Iraqi troops who are meant, in that classic American phrase, to put an “Iraqi face” on the American battle to come. No news reports on these new Iraqi troops seem complete anymore without a quote from a skeptical American like “‘These people,’ says [Marine Sgt.] Scarfe, ‘will let us walk right to our death.’” And almost all reports out of Iraq indicate that these troops like the Iraqi police are thoroughly infiltrated by the insurgents. (“‘The infiltration is all over, from the top to the bottom, from decision making to the lower levels,’ says [a] senior Iraqi official.”) In fact, just this weekend reports have surfaced that a Kurdish officer in the Iraqi security forces, briefed on the American plans for taking Falluja, has deserted, evidently with his briefing notes but without his uniform.

On the American side, our troops have been used as pawns in a game of political chess that certainly will leave them more exposed in any battle for Falluja than might otherwise have been the case. Our ultimate threat, of course, is that those 10,000 soldiers backed by air power and artillery will make an example of Falluja, producing an American version of the Roman solution to Carthage. It would serve as a fierce example of what might lie in store for any incompliant Sunni or Shiite city. As the intelligence outfit Stratfor recently put it in a report, “The Politics of Storming Al Fallujah”: “[T]he fate of Al Fallujah will likely serve as an example to tribal leaders throughout the country who have remained undecided about their relationships with coalition forces and the IIG [Iraq Interim Government].” In other words, if you can’t “liberate” them, crush them.

With the power of that threat in mind, our offensive against Falluja has been one of the slowest developing and most publicly announced events of recent times. This, in turn, means we have left the Fallujan insurgents all the time in the world to plan for the defense of the city or to fade away as the fighting begins. (Some Americans are already suggesting that casualties in the coming battle will reach Vietnam-era levels.) The insurgents, in turn, have been offering their own set of threats, ranging from waves of car bombs to missiles “tipped with deadly chemicals including cyanide.” (Hala Jaber, Times, 11/7/04)

Who knows what part of all this is bluff and bluster. What we do know is that, while we wait for the battle for Falluja to begin, it’s actually begun. Hala Jaber, a reporter of Lebanese background working for the British Times (which bills him as “the only western newspaper reporter inside Falluja”), reports that on his first night in the city the U.S. Air Force attacked in waves from just after midnight to just after 5 AM. “I began to count out loud,” he writes, “as the bombs tumbled to the ground with increasingly monotonous regularity. There were 38 in the first half-hour alone.” The perimeter of the town, he adds, is “already largely in ruins. The crumbling remains of houses and shell-pocked walls reminded me of my home town Beirut in the 1980s at the height of Lebanon’s civil war.”

In the meantime, as veteran reporter Dilip Hiro has explained, the insurgents were conducting their own “battle of Falluja” via concerted attacks this weekend in Samarra (only recently retaken by American troops), Baghdad, Ramadi, and around Falluja itself. Their point, brutally brought home via car bomb, is that it may be far easier to take than hold the Fallujas of Iraq; that to invest and seize Falluja is not the same thing as throttling the insurgency. In addition over the last months, the guerrillas have more generally clamped down on supply and troop transport by road and, as in Vietnam, helicopters have already become the preferred means of travel — and also of battle — for Americans. (“The ominous thumping sound of American helicopters roaring over Baghdad’s rooftops is becoming as emblematic of this war as it was of Vietnam,” writes Jim Krane of the Associated Press.)

Iyad Allawi’s interim government, despite its state-of-emergency declaration this weekend, has been incapable of extending its control over any significant parts of the country. As Rod Nordland, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Michael Hirsh of Newsweek report, “Even [a] Bush administration official who evinced confidence about the new Fallujah offensive admitted that the new Iraq under the interim government is ‘not jelling. How can [ordinary Iraqis] support a government that doesn’t really exist in many ways?’”

And here’s a sign of the times: Lindsey Hilsum of the British Observer reports that some American commanders, not exactly exuding optimism about the future of an occupied Falluja, “have been studying a book entitled Russia’s Chechnya Wars 1994-2000: Lessons from Urban Combat. In 1995 the Russians pounded [the Chechnyan capital] Grozny until the neighbourhoods harbouring Chechen fighters were reduced to rubble but, nine years on, rebels are still blowing up Russian soldiers with booby-trap bombs.”

At the moment, most checks and balances have been wiped away, not only in the United States but globally. The Bush administration will now do more or less as it pleases. Within days, as former British Foreign Minister Robin Cook wrote, administration officials are likely to “celebrate their election victory by putting Falluja to the torch.”

But, as Dilip Hiro indicates, the one-legged American strategy that places military power above all else is likely to prove no less a disaster now than it has for the last year in Iraq. Falluja may be flattened while the Iraqi insurgency only spreads. And what then? In games like this, you can find yourself spending your “political capital” fast indeed. After all, this is now really George’s war.

Oh, and in the one-world category, Haber of the Times reports that when the Fallujans he’s bunking with grow bored of rerunning and critiquing scenes from resistance snuff videos the way you might “a controversial moment in a football match,” they play video games while the bombardment continues outside — just like, and probably from the same global selection of games as, the young Marines camped outside their city. It’s a small world and welcome to it. We’re all going to be here for a while.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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