This weblog wasn't designed for high-profile activities, so I'll be a spectator to Spirit of America's "Friends of Iraq Blogger Challenge," a fundraising marathon for the premier private charity organization in Iraq. But I have donated, plan to do so again soon, and will be working with my local Republican organization to direct funds towards Jim Hake' brainchild.

Spirit of America has blossomed since its inception, its website detailing multiple ongoing projects in Iraq and Afghanistan to which donors can contribute specifically. Want to help Iraqi seamstresses or craftsmen in newly constructed vocational centers? Fund Marines trying to irrigate an agricultural community? Help grassroots efforts to foster civics and democratic activities? Choose a project and give.

While Allied forces continue to hammer terrorists in Iraq, the battle for control of public perception continues in newspapers, on the internet and airwaves. Some contrarian news agencies are nosing around the Marine footage discussed yesterday; others seem disconcerted by the pace of events, where fresh possibilities for enemy gain emerge only to be pounded flat by Americans and Iraqis, and the result is not unlike watching the operators of a classic two-man cow suit each trying to walk in a different direction. One Associated Press story is particularly revealing: the headline reads "Fallujah Offensive Intensifies," complete with a sub-header "Heavy Fighting," only to be followed by a sentence declaring that "airstrikes and gunfire waned considerably after a week of heavy fighting." Come again?

Media consensus is admitting Mosul to be "calm" (or at least "calmer")shortly after journalists were highlighting it as proof of a "spreading insurgency." "Loud explosions" seem to have been a staple of the Allies' restoration of order in the northern Iraqi city; in fact, the past few days have seen a dearth of "quiet explosions," and "heavy machine-gun fire" is rather outproducing "light machine-gun fire," too.

Another favorite media phrase, "wave of violence," seems not to describe the reality of Iraqis living in the same section of Baghdad as Omar Fadhil does:

Being out of the events' field for a week and having the media as the only source of information made me understand more why many people have a blurred vision about the situation in Iraq, I mean watching Al- Jazeera and the CNN for a relatively long time made Iraq- at certain moments-look like "hell on earth." Fortunately I lived my whole life in Iraq and when it comes to events taking place over there I can distinguish between the truth and the lies to a certain degree but my concern is about people who have never been there because the media twist facts and exaggerate things in an unbelievable manner.

As a matter of fact, from the news I got from the media I expected to find Baghdad in a terrible condition when I return; no gasoline, no electricity, fighting at every corner and dead bodies everywhere but of course I didn’t find it this way when I returned. Actually I haven't seen any significant difference except for losing some hours of electricity!

Omar and his brothers were recently in Jordan working with Jim Hake' Spirit of America on a public outreach to encourage democratic participation among Iraqis. Weblogs, discussions, lectures, you name it:

We've already carried out some activities that are related to this project including lectures like this one at the college of physical education for girls. We were worried about the way students would react to a lecture like this one but amazingly the hall was full and the seats were not enough for the students. Moreover some of them engaged the lecturers in questions and discussions and most of them were eager to participate in the elections but they knew little about elections, democracy and constitution, etc., and were so pleased to find someone willing to teach them. The way we see it is that the most important thing is to educate as many Iraqis as possible about the upcoming elections, their significance and how important each vote is.

The upcoming elections are what, of course, the thugs fighting our troops and killing innocent Iraqis seek to prevent.

Talk of the Geneva Convention obscures the bestial nature of those who oppose a democratic Iraq, application of the same dehumanizing these killers' victims. For those momentarily disoriented by the near-disgraceful judgment of a Marine trying to defend himself and his fellow men, a point of clarity from Interim Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih:

Iraqis are striving to construct a society where freedom of choice, the democratic process and the rule of law are paramount. They want - as they continually tell me and my colleagues in the Iraqi interim government - freedom, peace and stability for their children. No one should be able to deny them this dream. But a small minority of Saddam loyalists and foreign terrorists who have nothing to offer but violence are trying to do just that. They exist in various parts of Iraq, but their base has been Fallujah for some time.

From this city they have terrorized the local population and spread murder across the country. They have blown up women and children and executed in cold blood fellow Iraqis trying to end the lawlessness in our country. No civilized person can stand by and allow this to continue. No civilized person should support those behind this campaign of murder.

Good for those who publicized Mr. Salih's appeal, as it is the true voice of Iraq.

The mainstream media's adversarial relationship with the American military continues (yesterday's observations here). A quick look at Google News' headlines from Fallujah. Reporting is, in a word, terrible. Relevant, objective information could fit into one paragraph, but many stories are sentence after sentence of dirges. Most authors are attempting to blame the necessity of the battle on Allied forces; and most omit any reference to the horrific conditions that existed while the city remained in the hands of terrorists. Biased journalists' favorite technique of statement/contradiction is in full play; the military's emphatic differentiation of "occupy" from "secure" has been largely ignored.

Some press agencies are currently probing, for damage potential, an incident in Fallujah where a Marine shot a terrorist in a mosque who was either dead, wounded or, as the Marine believed, playing possum to continue trying to kill Allied troops. I have seen a video of the circumstance, minus the moment when the Marine fired his rifle. I will leave legality to the professionals, but common sense prevails here: two Marine units had taken fire from a mosque (itself a violation of the conduct of war, just one of the myriad violations committed by terrorists, around whom mainstream media outlets are ironically trying to wrap the Geneva Convention). Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, our various enemies have been known to fake surrenders or incapacitation and kill American soldiers who close in to take them into custody. Terrorists laced with explosives, waiting to kill the first American or Iraqi who comes near, have also been reported (Hat tip, Alec Rawls). The terrorist was lying on the floor of the building. If alive, was he making no effort to show no hostile intent because he was unable to do so — or unwilling to do so? Knowing that Allied troops had been attacked from this previously cleared location, the Marine concluded the latter; in any event, saving American and Allied lives. As a caller on Bill Bennett's program asked rhetorically this morning, "If the Marine [next to a potential threat] were your son, what would you have him do?"

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.

The brothers Fadhil, of Baghdad weblog Iraq the Model, are celebrating their first anniversary of sharing the freedom of expression with thousands across the world.

Says Mohammed:

This wasn’t an action from one side, your have always been a rich source of inspiration to us. We have learned the meaning of being united together and we never felt alone in this; freedom lovers are everywhere. Reading your comments and e-mails made me cry many times and I wish I could remember all your names and I could feel everyone, even those who didn’t write to us. I wish I could embrace you all.

And Ali:

This simple web page has come to be an important part of my life for reasons that are much more than just expressing my point of view in politics and the situation in Iraq. It is my window to the world through which I greet my friends every morning from Australia to the USA. It's not a one way road, as I feel I know each one of our regular readers, I worry about you just as you worry about us and I miss you when you’re gone for any reason. I learned from you a lot and the most important things I've learned were actually things I thought I knew very well before!

And finally, Omar:

The most important thing we achieved in the past year is building trust and understanding among us, [defeating] the evil attempts of those who want us to think of each other as enemies. I believe that we've all learned so many things from each other and to some extent, we've succeeded in bridging even if a small fraction of the gap that separates our different cultures, at least in the way of thinking about solutions for our problems because we're facing similar challenges and above all, we share a common goal; freedom for all mankind.

To many more years of Iraq the Model, fellows. Your work is already an inspiration to many of us who work every day to encourage Americans and others in their noblest task. May your democratic Iraq stand as an inspiration to and soon work as a deliverer of the peoples who have not yet joined our world of liberty.

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?

When the insurgent claim to be Arabist and Islamist saviors of Iraqis beset by the ponderous Western imports of freedom and dignity disintegrated, largely from the insurgents' compulsive acts of violence and intimidation against Iraqis, it would follow that Iraq's terrorist invaders and has-beens might settle with being feared as formidable opponents.

Not so, at least for Hammorabi, who's mocking them up and down.

In time for Veterans Day, Central Command directs us to an audio-visual archive for a closer look at the Iraqi Intervention Force, a branch that can count more than a few successes in Fallujah for its own. Two interviews (here and here) and five minutes of training footage show us the present and future defenders of a democratic Iraq, as well as fruits of our own soldiers' labor.

The reclamation of Fallujah was never so much about capturing one or two terrorists, such as Abu Musab al Zarqawi, but obliterating terrorist manpower and ending the city's use as a base of operations. And a hall of horrors:

Iraqi troops have found "hostage slaughterhouses" in Fallujah where foreign captives were held and killed, the commander of Iraqi forces in the city said Wednesday. Troops found CDs and records of people taken captive in houses in the northern part of Fallujah, Maj. Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem Mohan told reporters.

"We have found hostage slaughterhouses in Fallujah that were used by these people and the black clothing that they used to wear to identify themselves, hundreds of CDs and whole records with names of hostages," the general said at a military camp near Fallujah.

This was the macabre livelihood Kofi Annan didn't want to disrupt. So far as ideals go, the United Nations deserves burial as any other thing that is dead.

Meanwhile, more of Fallujah is restored to its rightful ownership of Iraq's soon-to-be-elected government by the hour, and the Iraqi Intervention Force — in the face of derisive press — has racked up a considerable list of completed objectives.

DON'T CALL THEM 'ENEMY SOLDIERS,' JUST 'THUGS': Believed to be in disarray, the men who used Fallujah as a stronghold from which to prey on the innocent now find themselves judged by the proper authority:

U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies have essentially paralyzed the insurgent forces in Fallujah and cut off their escape routes from the city, the senior U.S. Marine commander there said Wednesday.

"We are comfortable that they are not able to communicate, to work out any coordination," Lt. Gen. John Sattler told a news conference at Camp Fallujah, outside the city. "They are now in small pockets, blind, moving about the city. We will continue to hunt them down and destroy them."

...Sattler, appearing with a senior Iraqi general, declined to discuss the positions and strategy of the American and Iraqi forces still fighting in Fallujah. But he said they have followed their battle plan and left the remaining insurgents with no good options.

...Maj. Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem Mohan, speaking through an interpreter, said it was "possible but unlikely" that any insurgents have escaped in the days since the city was sealed off. Asked by a reporter to describe the fighting tactics of the insurgents, he replied, "They have no tactics."

Nor strategy, nor code, nor sense, nor continued right to existence. To hell they will go, indeed.

With the seizure of a hospital and two bridges spanning the Euphrates, Allied forces led by United States Marines have begun what Chester, who is liveblogging tonight (Sunday night) and will continue to monitor events, calls a "rolling assault" against terrorists in Fallujah.

ENTERS THE CAT: Wretchard of Belmont Club, as usual, is appropriately insightful.