I shouldn’t need to comment on Fallujah in general, the prisoner shootings in particular, or the unlikeliness that capturing the city really accomplished anything. The pointlessness is self-evident in the one case, and the other is the obvious result of giving guns to young men, scaring the piss out of them, and demonizing an entire culture.
The bigger picture, on the other hand, I might have something to say about. Except that Willam Polk says it better than I could in his essay American Options in Iraq. Take a minute to read it all (it’s only a dozen or so paragraphs). If you need convincing to click let me note that Polk is a former Member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council, responsible for the Middle East, he was Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Founding-Director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
