Before Operation Al Fajr began, Fallujah was treated by the elite media as an impregnable terrorist enclave, the epitome of "no-go zones" in Iraq used to such nationally damaging — but, thankfully, politically unsuccessful — effect by Senator John Kerry and his presidential campaign. In the days leading up to earnest ground operations, the press could be heard licking its chops in anticipation of controversy, strife and gross amounts of patented "international outcry." In the early stages of engagement, agencies appeared torn on whether to report the operation in terms of difficulty or futility, with the overused phrase "fierce fighting" on one hand and "insurgents may already have fled" on the other. One could easily predict a chimerical media narrative of strategically insignificant insurgents waylaying Allied soldiers like the proper sons of Mao, but as the battle quickly and clearly went to the Allies, that storyline could not and did not emerge. An Islamist party whose loyalty to a democratic Iraq was unlikely departed Baghdad's government, reflecting more on the obtuseness of terrorist sympathizers than the justification of Al Fajr. Their fellow Iraqis held firm.
Of marginal help to contrarian reporting were the small acts of killing and mayhem that occurred in cities and towns in the center and north of Iraq, marginal because military planners predicted them: in the words of one American diplomat, "You will have a shortish period when everybody will say the whole country's falling apart but they (the insurgents) will not be able to maintain that tempo." Today, Central Command is reporting that Mosul, whose police forces were harrassed by terrorists earlier, is stable — to the point where the infantry battalion dispatched to maintain order has returned to work at Fallujah to continue endgame operations.
What about the terrorists not caught in the Fallujah vise? South of Baghdad, a key, enemy-damaged bridge has been repaired, just one story of many; indeed, our troops "will rebuild what the terrorists tear down." Fallujah was no Hue City; Iraq has never been nor will be a Vietnam. Anti-liberation protesters can't even get a break in California, let alone a quarter of a million on DC's Mall. Denied a political mandate earlier this month, leftists are fast running out of selective historical precedents on which to hang their berets.
