It's important not to let revisionism escape unanswered when it is pernicious to our war aims and abusive of the truth. Fallujah was a successful operation whose reconstruction has been hampered by insurgency war crimes necessitating strict security.
The article *is* quite thorough, almost as educational as Lord Haw Haw. Sieges succeed when the administration of a city falls. The article does not actually contend that the US actually failed in its siege but that reconstruction is a problem. Maybe that's just a problem of headline writing. What cannot be fairly laid at the feet of propagandists at the Asia Times is the unsubstantiated assertion that "There are daily war crimes being committed in Fallujah, even now," and that a group is honestly working to "document the war crimes and illegal weapons that were used during the November siege" without making even one credible assertion of a war crime that the US perpetrated.Posted by TMLutas at June 9, 2005 01:48 PMThere were war crimes aplenty in Fallujah when it was under insurgent control. They were running torture chambers, raping and killing innocents, abusing all sorts of sanctuary provisions including the sanctuary of surrender, hiding among civilians, pretending to be wounded, using mosques for military purposes, fighting without uniform, etc. I do not think that this sort of thing is what Mohammed Abdulla, the executive director of the Study Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Fallujah is complaining about.
It is those abuses of the normal sanctuaries of war that require extraordinary security measures be imposed on the civilian population of Fallujah. That greatly slows down reconstruction and makes complaints and resentment inevitable. The war crimes are the insurgency's though and we should not forget it.