The narrative for the battle of Fallujah, as a battle going better than hoped, appears to have followed Allied and Iraqi troops in their accomplishment of major objectives:

The U.S. military's ground and air assault of Fallujah has gone quicker than expected, with the entire city occupied after six days of fighting, the Marine commander who planned the offensive said Sunday.

Twelve hundred terrorists are believed dead, so for every American serviceman fallen nearly forty Fallujah-couched thugs were put down. The Marines' clever use of deception is being credited with the speed of the kind of lopsided victories we had seen twice with the criminals and terrorists following Muqtada al Sadr. Strong points and ammunition spots were bombarded to deny the enemy tactical and logistical advantages, feints were executed to face him opposite the direction of the Allied advance and bring him out into the open. And the cordon around the city, one that some corners of the news media began to portray as a sieve, netted its share.

Most notable is the chief planner's strategic assessment of this attack to the one aborted in May:

"Maybe we learned from April," [Marine Maj. Gen. Richard] Natonski said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We learned we can't do it piecemeal. When we go in, we go all the way through. We had the green light this time and we went all the way.

"Had we done in April what we did now, the results would've been the same."

For six months I have taken care not to second-guess the Marines' decision to withdraw from Fallujah and implement the ambitious, if unsuccessful, Fallujah brigade. Others, in journalism and the blogosphere, did not; some more adamant than others, incorporating the sense of Fallujah as politically influenced bungling into a self-evident truth on which to build more far-reaching hypotheses. While few might argue that leaving Fallujah to the terrorists allowed the perpetuation of a central base from which to plot attacks that killed hundreds, the intention of those who left it until now would not seem to fit the characteristic of war by politics. Fallujah would be wrested from strongmen; if we are to trust men like General Natonski, it was not a matter of if but when and how. As the days of combat were winding down in May, I wrote this:

As the Marine Corps made clear in Fallujah, insurgents were utterly outmatched and their position in the Golan neighborhood stood at the mercy of an American initiative. Whatever reprieve the Ba'athists gained after days of heavy losses began — and thus can end — at our forces' choosing.

So it ended.

There is still work to be done, not only in Fallujah but the rest of the country. The city's cleaning, however, will strike another blow to the region's authoritarian mythology that we can only now begin to observe and appreciate. And we will see just how Abu Musab al Zarqawi and others can continue to frustrate Iraq's democratic ambitions, having never achieved any popularity among Iraqis, and now about 1,200 men and a collaborative city short.

FROM THOSE WHO KNOW: Chester is comparing the Fallujah report to his own expectations, and notes that Ramadi has been, perhaps à la Fallujah, cordoned off.

ANIMALS: Is this what Kofi Annan believed added credibility to Iraq's democratic sovereignty?