Whether Wretchard of Belmont Club is a grizzled old grandfather who sits down to blog with whiskey-tinted coffee or a smart, young strategist every party wishes they had on the payroll, he has masterfully predicted most events in Fallujah for the last month. Retreat, you say? Not so, if Wretchard is again largely correct: Marine "withdrawal" tossed about in headlines is indeed repositioning, and the imported Iraqi soldiers will be used as a dustpan to the Marines' brush. Americans, it would seem, are quite capable of nuance:

One of the risks to taking the town was always that the defenders would use the opportunity to stage their own Viking funeral pyre by torching the town and roasting as many civilians as they could with it. The answer, it seemed back in April 3 was:

However, if the Marines exert only gradual pressure, and use neighbors or Iraqi police from outside Fallujah to guide other neighbors into processing areas, the defenders will never be presented with a clear opportunity to precipitate a crisis. Once the Marines get the momentum of processing going, the tribal leaders will lose control and the whole structure will start to crumble. The Marines can exploit their physical domination by offering clemency or even rewards to those who rat out on other perps. The inner bastion of Fallujah will collapse like a termite-eaten post as each man looks out for himself.

It is in this context that the perplexing cycle of ceasefires punctuated by nocturnal assaults can be understood. The Corps, besides incorporating the Chinese word Gung Ho into it's vocabulary, may have finally proved to the Arabs that they can out-hudna anyone who ever stood on a patch of sand. By alternately throttling and releasing the enemy, or in cruder terms, by a process of talking and shooting, the USMC seems to have squeegeed the foe into the 'Golan' without ever precipitating the feared crisis. ("Like a cut flower in a vase, fair to see, yet doomed to die" -- Winston Churchill)

Anesthetic applied before the dagger. Read, scroll, read the next; reread. Then skip cable news and enjoy the weekend. Needless to say, the Marines appear to be finishing the job the Army — whom my leatherneck coworker once called "only half-effective anyway" — didn't or wasn't allowed to do.