Digging In For A Fight

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Even if you have all the troops in the world, it may not do any good against an enemy that's firing on you from inside ambulances and using children as human shields. Nowhere is the challenge of how to win the battle without losing the war as painfully visible as it is in Fallujah, where the Marines' siege entered its fourth week with both hopes for a resolution and fear of a bloodbath. The city of 200,000, 35 miles west of Baghdad, is the war's open sore. A Sunni stronghold, it has festered since the start of the occupation, when U.S. forces faced with a crowd of anti-American demonstrators killed 17 civilians. Since then, about half a dozen different military outfits have had responsibility for keeping order, which has made it hard for soldiers to build relationships with any local Iraqis not allied with the die-hard Saddam loyalists and foreign jihadists who set up shop in the city.

Many officers maintained that Fallujah had to be taken on eventually, and the ambush and mutilation of four U.S. security contractors in the city in March set the stage. The U.S. vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Marines surrounded the city, imposed a curfew and engaged in a pitched battle with what the White House now says could be as many as "a few thousand" insurgents. Hopes for a peaceful resolution fluttered when Iraqi civic leaders helped broker a cease-fire: if the insurgents would surrender their heavy weapons, the Marines would pull back from their cordon. The U.S. even offered to let Iraqi officers from Fallujah lead patrols there.

But Lieut. General James T. Conway, the Marines' top commander in Iraq, has not been impressed by the weapons turned in so farthe first truckload last week was a rusty junk bin of antique arms--and warned that an all-out assault would follow if the rebels did not comply. A showdown, he said, would come in "days, not weeks." Some former Pentagon officials are worried about the signal that deadline sent. "We've got to stop this business of getting up in front of the world and saying, 'We are going to do this in Fallujah,' and then we seem to back off the next day," says former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni. "In that part of the world, strength is respected greatly, and if you look weak, you're in trouble."

There was good reason for the Americans' hesitation: the prospect of a full assault on the city was having repercussions across the country, where moderate Iraqis were watching Arab TV stations that claimed there had already been hundreds of civilian casualties in Fallujah. At Friday prayers in Baghdad, at least one prominent Sunni cleric called for an uprising in the Sunni areas if Fallujah was attacked.

--THE POLITICAL FALLOUT