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.
Well, she was right. Red Cross apparently fear there may be 800 dead civilians (http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/hard_news/000121.php#more) on top of the 12-1600 insurgents. Sheesh. Just like Saddam putting down the Shias in 1991, eh?
But will it stop the insurgents operations, or simply move them elsewhere?