Screams will not be heard

Madeleine Bunting believes Fallujah will be a bloodbath, but seems to make some strange suggestions:

The recent comment of one Falluja resident is strikingly poignant: “Why,” she asked wearily, “don’t they go and fight in a desert away from houses and people?” Why indeed? Twentieth-century warfare ensured a remarkable historical inversion. Once the city had been the place of safety to retreat to in a time of war, the place of civilisation against the barbarian wilderness; but the invention of aerial bombardment turned the city into a target, a place of terror.

I think it would be ever so convenient for Zarqawai and his thugs to be in a house out in the desert, but they are not. They are in Fallujah.

The problem with any victory for the US is that it will likely be a pyrrhic one.