Marine General Opposed Fallouja Attack

In fairness to the Marines regarding my previous posting, the Marine general in charge of Fallouja says he opposed the original Marine attack, in which the Marines were defeated. The description by Marine General Conway in the L.A. Times of what happened in Fallouja, after the killing of American private security guards and the desecration of their corpses, tracks with what I thought probably happened. The draft dodgers in Washington gave the Marines the order to attack Fallouja, and then when the fighting got tough and Arabs around the world began to protest the deaths, the draft dodgers told the Marines to stop fighting, making them take the rap as cowards, when in fact the cowards were in Washington, or at least in the safety of the Green Zone in Baghdad.

First, the Marines did not refuse to fight when told to do so, and secondly, they were not the ones who decided to run from the fight when the fighting got tough. To me the key quotation in the L.A. Times article from the general is this: "I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, that you really need to understand what the consequences are, and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that," Conway said. "Once you commit, you've got to stay committed."

What about Bush's promises to stay the course, challenging the forces fighting the US in Iraq (whoever they are) to "bring it on." They brought it on, and we ran like cowards. But the Marines were not the cowards.