MORE WAR.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 29-NOV-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"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...

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