MORE WAR.(The Talk of the Town)

"The city has been seized. We have liberated the city of Falluja," General John Abizaid declared on November 14th, six days after the Marines began their assault on Iraq's notorious insurgent stronghold. The Sunni warlords who had run Falluja as their own jihadi fiefdom--terrorizing its inhabitants and using it as a launchpad for a relentless campaign of suicide bombings, ambushes, kidnappings, and assassinations--have been routed. But Abizaid was right to emphasize that it was the battlefield, and not the battle, that was won. In this regard, Falluja appears emblematic of the larger American venture in Iraq, where military superiority has yet to purchase political order. Much of the city was reduced to rubble, and the fighting was not finished when the General claimed victory: even as Iraqi corpse collectors and American reconstruction assessors went to work, marines kept killing and getting killed while trying to mop up neighborhoods that they thought they'd mopped up the day before. "I am here," a defiant insurgent leader told the Washington Post. "You can see me." Indeed, his comrades were suddenly to be seen all over Iraq. As Falluja fell, the insurgents struck in Baghdad and Baiji and Balad and Baquba and Buhritz and Hawija and Hit and Iskandariyah and Mosul and Qaim and Ramadi and Samarra and Tall Afar and Tikrit.

When the Bush Administration invaded Iraq, it never anticipated that it would still be conducting major combat operations a year and a half later, just two months before the country's first nationwide elections are supposed to take place. Of course, there never was a serious plan for after the invasion, since planning would have involved a realistic assessment of risks--the sort of cautionary vision that Colin Powell's State Department represented within the Administration, and which Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon brushed aside. Rumsfeld believed that Iraq's old order of tyranny could be dismantled and replaced by democracy on the cheap and on the fly, with just half the number of troops that top military commanders recommended. Rumsfeld was wrong--the experiment has resulted in disaster. In this respect, too, the battle for Falluja is a microcosm of the over-all Iraqi predicament: as an attempt to compensate for the ceding of the city to the insurgents last April, it is less a measure of progress than a corrective to past blunders. (Many of the weapons now killing Americans are the same ones that the Americans allowed Iraqis to keep when they disbanded Saddam's army.)

For six months, the war was placed on hold while George W. Bush campaigned for a second term. He won, even though most Americans, including leaders in his own party, believe that he has mishandled Iraq. Bush himself, in a rare moment of candor during the campaign, described the war as "a catastrophic success," and he might have taken his election as an opportunity to approach Iraq with a fresh hand. Instead, he has chosen to pretend that his failed policies now enjoy a popular mandate, and, while the fighting raged in Falluja, he retooled his Cabinet to consolidate power in the hands of the advisers--Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, Stephen Hadley, and Rumsfeld--most intimately associated with the war's most ill-conceived strategies. Instead of a Cabinet, Bush now has a chorus, and, in lieu of a policy, he has an alibi: Iraq is a sovereign state again, and America is there only to support the interim President, Iyad Allawi. (According to this conceit, Bush--who accused John Kerry of scheming to subject American military actions to international approval--did ...