Iraq: No Easy Options

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The mosques of Fallujah were silent last week. There were no clerics left to call the faithful to prayer. Some of the minarets that rise above the city were bullet-ridden and broken, targeted by American guns aiming to kill any Iraqi insurgents who might be taking cover inside. Buildings throughout the city lay in smoldering ruins in the wake of days of U.S. tank assaults and air strikes. It is not surprising that a ferocious battle erupted in Fallujah--the heart of the so-called Sunni triangle, where those loyal to Saddam Hussein and his thuggish regime have made their most violent stands.. The Marine-led assault on the city was intended to deliver to the enemy fighters their long-delayed reckoning in what the U.S. billed as the latest critical offensive in its campaign to "liberate" Iraq. But even for those accustomed to the unending drumbeat of sorrow in Iraq, the grim scenes of urban warfare in Fallujah, where hundreds were said to have died, took a heavy toll--and the news for the U.S. in the rest of Iraq was not all that encouraging either.

For the past year many in Iraq's Shi'ite majority have chafed under the U.S. occupation--at the lack of jobs and the frustrating pace of the promised transition to Iraqi rule, a transition that promised to bring them to power. That simmering discontent last week turned into a full, chaos-inducing boil. Following a call to arms by a radical, power-hungry cleric named Muqtada al-Sadr, thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites declared war against a military that had freed them from a heinous dictator. In cities across Iraq, Shi'ite militants united behind the goal of casting off the yoke of occupation by killing or capturing any foreigner, military or civilian, they came across. Together with the fighting in Fallujah, the Shi'ite uprising produced the bloodiest eruption of violence since the war began. In the past week, 46 U.S. soldiers and more than 460 Iraqis were killed. Seemingly overnight, an uprising by the country's previously peaceful majority--a specter that has haunted U.S. planners and could doom chances for democracy in Iraq--went from remotely plausible to dangerously imminent.

The U.S. now faces a two-front insurgency. It stretches from restive cities west of Baghdad, such as Fallujah and Ramadi, to the Shi'ite provinces of southern Iraq, where until last week the U.S. believed it enjoyed the grudging support of a populace grateful that Saddam sits in a jail cell, awaiting trial for his crimes. There are signs that the siege in Fallujah and the resistance among those loyal to al-Sadr have united the traditionally fractious Shi'ites and Sunnis against a common enemy. In Baghdad half of those who joined a caravan carrying supplies to the mostly Sunni residents of Fallujah were Shi'ite demonstrators loyal to al-Sadr. Some shouted, "Hey, Fallujah, Sunni and Shi'ite coming to save you! Shi'ite and Sunni united together, thanks to America!"