Wretchard at Belmont Club, sifting through reports from Iraq, found a Defense Department overview on the veritable "wretched hive of scum and villainy" that is the city of Fallujah. In shorthand, even beyond the vast differences in cultural progress and security between the Sunni Triangle and the rest of Iraq, Fallujah is not an accurate reflection of today's Iraq:

While Iraq is laced with antiquities, Fallujah isn't one of them. Just after World War II, the population of the town was around 10,000. The city, about 40 miles west of Baghdad, is on the edge of the desert, and now has about 300,000 citizens. It is a dry and arid landscape, made productive only because of extensive irrigation from the nearby Euphrates River. It was, however, located on the main routes into Jordan and Syria. And in crime, as in real estate, location is everything. The city was on the main route for smugglers, and sheltered a number of very successful crime lords. ...When Saddam Hussein took power in 1979, the city received a boost. Many of the people in Fallujah supported Saddam, and many of his closest advisors, highest- ranking military officers and high-ranking members of the Baath Party came from Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and other areas in the center of the Sunni Triangle. Arab tribes in and around the city also owed fealty to Saddam and became bastions of the regime. Hussein returned the favor by building factories in the city and providing jobs for his chosen people.

...Following the Gulf War, the city became an even larger smuggling center, this time with government encouragement, officials said. Saddam encouraged the smugglers to skirt the U.N.-imposed sanctions on Iraq.

The city is Saddam's own diabolical social science experiment. And as we can never let slip from our mind, people living in and around Fallujah comprise two very different groups:

Since the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, former regime supporters have allied themselves with foreign fighters who seem to be entering Iraq via Syria, officials said. U.S. officials suspect that members of al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam have cells in the city. Other terror groups have allied themselves with former regime elements and Sunni extremists, making for a very volatile mix. Officials said these groups intimidate the larger population of Fallujah, and these citizens seem to be caught in the middle. If the people of Fallujah cooperate with the former regime members, then coalition forces will come after them. If they cooperate with the coalition, then they will be killed.

Solution: the only one the Allies began with in March 2003. With all care to keep civilians out of harm's way — and these thugs' tactical plans — the Marines must utterly destroy one of the last bastions of the old ways.