The US Marines entered Falluja today in an attempt to retake the city from the insurgents. Now, everyone hase been up-i-arms about this for months now on both sides of the political fence. But the truth is, Falluja doesn't matter.
Why doesn't it matter? That's easy. We're not fighting a conventional or even a conventional guerilla war. Up to now, Iraq has been compared to Vietnam. As always, the US military is fighting the last war, so everyone states that this one won't be like Vietnam! The problem there is, we're fighting this war in a way that we think Vietnam should have been fought and ignoring that this isn't like Vietnam.
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The insurgence in Iraq has a number of major differences from Vietnam.
- There was a North Vietnam and China which supplied weapons to the Vietcong. There is no single state supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgents. In fact, except for ancient historical examples, this may be the first modern war where the enemy is being funded and supplied by private means. Saudi Arabia, supposedly our ally, has wealthy private citizens aiding the insurgents. Under what we have up to now considered normal warfare, these people would be rounded up and tossed into jail or tried for treason.
- The insurgents have no intention of fighting a straight-out pitched battle. This can be seen from how quickly we went into Bagdhad. We rolled through what little resistance there was, believing that that would be the end of it. Our taking Falluja will only mean that they will move somewhere else. We cannot win this war by simply attacking towns and cities. The insurgents will just move.
- There is no central command, so you can kill so-called leaders all you want, they'll just be replaced by someone else who hates us.
The best we can hope for is what the NIE said: a constant state of low-grade aggression. The enemy doesn't need to win; they just have to keep irritating us, and like the elephant and the flies, they will eventually irritate us to death.