Falluja Follies
BOOT, MAX
Falluja Follies How Marines, and politics, fought the insurgents. by MAX BOOT Not long ago I found myself researching the 1898 Battle of Omdurman, in which General Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian...
...He turned out to be a perfect (if occasionally hair-raising) guide...
...At the same time, Moktada al Sadr's Mahdist militia was rising up to challenge coalition forces in Najaf, Karbala, and other cities...
...It is hard to think of anyone better qualified to chronicle Marine war-fighting...
...But they were not allowed to finish it...
...Now, in No True Glory, West describes the Marines' fights in Falluja in 2004, their toughest tests since the initial invasion...
...As the full awfulness of the situation became inescapable, President Bush and Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi decided that they had no choice but to regain control...
...The two senior Marines in Iraq—Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (roughly equivalent to an army corps), and Major General James Mattis, commander of the First Marine Division—did not want to alter their strategy of slowly extending their control over this Sunni city, which had been hostile to Americans since the start of the occupation...
...The first of these, The March Up, described what he saw as he and a coauthor accompanied the First Marine Division on its sprint to Baghdad in April-May 2003...
...By the time the guerrillas had been routed, Falluja had been devastated—full, as West writes, of "drooping telephone poles, gutted storefronts, heaps of concrete, twisted skeletons of burnt-out cars, demolished roofs, and sagging walls...
...By the time the second assault began on November 7, the insurgents were much stronger than they had been in April...
...No True Glory features amazing accounts of heroism, brutality, perseverance, and gallows humor...
...They proposed gathering intelligence and picking off the ambush's ringleaders, one by one, over the next few weeks...
...A political disaster appeared to be looming, with members of the Iraqi Governing Council threatening to resign if the United States did not end its "atrocities" in Falluja...
...And they were right...
...While the Marines were making military progress, they were losing the battle for public opinion...
...The most famous of these, of course, is The River War, written by a junior cavalry officer and part-time correspondent named Winston Churchill...
...By the evening of April 8, Mattis estimated that his men were 48-72 hours away from finishing the fight...
...Bush accepted their recommendation to order a unilateral ceasefire, apparently unaware that Con-way and Mattis—the men on the spot— strongly disagreed...
...But the Marines were also better prepared...
...They had not wanted to launch this offensive in the first place, but they knew that stopping prematurely would only embolden the insurgents to greater depravities...
...They were estimated to total at least 3,000 men, and they had had months to dig trenches, rig booby traps, and barricade streets...
...by MAX BOOT Not long ago I found myself researching the 1898 Battle of Omdurman, in which General Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian expeditionary force devastated a Sudanese army of Islamic militants...
...Their six battalions were backed by three Army battalions, a British battalion, and three Iraqi battalions, giving the coalition a total force of some 12,000...
...The only news out of the city came from Al Jazeera and other Arabic-language outlets sympathetic to the insurgents, who passed along exaggerated claims of civilian casualties...
...He went on to become an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, and has remained close to the Corps ever since...
...Prevented from controlling the city themselves, the Marines acceded to the request of former Baathist army officers that they be allowed to organize a force of local men to keep order...
...Anyone who dared to cooperate with the Iraqi government or U.S...
...But that wasn't good enough for L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and General John Abizaid, head of Central Command...
...His son, Owen West, is another Marine veteran and author...
...On April 9, 2003, for instance, "Mad Dog" Mattis was late to a meeting with senior brass because he had stopped his command convoy to help a small patrol reduce a house from which they had taken machine-gun fire...
...I had the good fortune to accompany Bing on one of his many trips to Iraq...
...Steevens of the Daily Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times...
...It is hard to imagine an Iraqi general —or a general in just about any other army in the world—risking his neck in this manner...
...The Falluja Brigade was quickly exposed as a farce...
...But the most valuable information came from a source that seldom gets much critical respect— "instant histories" written by journalists and rushed into print within months of the events being described...
...They wanted an immediate assault to punish those responsible for hanging charred American corpses on a bridge...
...forces was killed...
...The fruits of his labors are apparent in a you-are-there feel that cannot be faked...
...And, while many other correspondents have ventured to the front lines in Iraq, few have stayed as long as West, or brought as much knowledge of military affairs to their work...
...While West does not stint the political ramifications of the assault, his focus remains—and rightly so—on the frontlines...
...Bremer and Abizaid did not want to risk the political fallout from continuing the attack...
...The two are now collaborating on a screenplay of No True Glory, which has been optioned by Hollywood...
...I was particularly struck by two kinds of stories recounted over and over: tales of wounded Marines—many badly wounded and eligible for medical evacuation—struggling to get back into battle, and tales of senior officers joining privates and corporals on the firing line...
...And third, he's got an insatiable thirst for adventure, which leads him to seek out the most dangerous areas to see for himself what's going on...
...The greatness is provided by the Marines, who showed superhuman courage and dedication in their assaults upon Falluja—assaults that deserve to go down along with Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, and Hue City in the annals of the Corps...
...I read reports and letters written by British officers, contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, and subsequent historical studies...
...But equally, if not more, valuable, were volumes by such long-forgotten figures as Bennett Burleigh of the Daily Telegraph, Ernest Bennett of the Westminster Gazette, and G.W...
...Such stories demonstrate the Corps's egalitarian ethos, and go a long way toward explaining its sky-high morale and superb fighting quality...
...Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush accepted their advice, and the Marines were told, against their better judgment, to enter the city of 280,000 in force without adequate preparation...
...Mail...
...Second, he's a great conversationalist, capable of instantly establishing rapport with a buck private or a three-star general...
...West quotes a gunnery sergeant: "The general flanked the hajis from the south...
...The dispiriting part of the book relates how their best efforts were often stymied by the dithering of military and political higher-ups...
...First, he's fearless, often taking off his body armor and helmet even while everybody else remained in their full "battle rattle...
...Such accounts are often scorned for lack of perspective and polish, yet I found their vivid writing, based on firsthand observation, invaluable in reconstructing what actually happened...
...The insurgents fought with suicidal courage, but they were no match for the Americans, who cleared the city house by house, suffering 70 dead and 609 wounded...
...The result is a book that will no doubt be studied by professionals for its meticulous accounts of small-unit tactics, but can also be enjoyed by the general public as a great—if at times dispiriting—yarn...
...The offensive began on the evening of April 4. Two Marine battalions advanced slowly against tough opposition, battling their way toward the city center...
...The insurgents were now in control of a major city in western Iraq, and they turned it into a center of bomb-making, kidnapping, and general mayhem...
...A hundred years from now historians will no doubt be equally grateful for Bing West's two volumes (so far) on the Iraq war...
...West was a Marine rifle platoon leader in the Vietnam War and author of The Village, the classic account of the Marines' combined action platoons...
...The trigger for the initial assault was the ambush and murder of four American security contractors in Falluja on March 31, 2004...
Vol. 11 • February 2006 • No. 22
