Fallujah militants say U.S. attack to be bloody

[DuctapeFatwa]

Rebels dressed as Iraqi police manned checkpoints in Fallujah on Monday as U.S. forces continued to mass outside the insurgent-controlled city in preparation for an assault everyone is certain will come soon.


Anxiety was palpable in the city. Merchants shuttered their shops. Streams of residents fled. The message was the same from mosque loudspeakers, photocopied pamphlets and whispers on street corners: The Americans are coming for a showdown.


Fallujah slipped from government control six months ago, when U.S. Marines pulled out of the city and installed a proxy Iraqi force that soon proved itself ineffective and infiltrated by militants. Regaining control of the city is a crucial step in weakening a deadly Sunni insurgency and smoothing the road to national elections scheduled for January, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.


Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has given no deadline for an attack on Fallujah but has insisted that the city must hand over foreign fighters and permit government forces to assume responsibility for law and order.


Peace negotiations have reached an impasse...

http://www.freep.com/news/nw/iraq2e_20041102.htm

[mikedemocrat]

1. This isn't going to be good

Lots of innocents will undoubtedly get caught in the middle

[saigon68]

2. A meat grinder for a lot of young Americans today

A real job for the police of amerika, tomorrow, when these young heros come back to the ZI troubled by PTSD and internal demons.

When they take to tall towers and try to "get even" with their sniper rifles.

[Nile]

3. The streets will run red with insurgent blood.

And so be it.

[PsychoDad]

4. It will also run mingled...

With the blood of young, poor, american men who are being used by the colonial forces to occupy the country.

Rich white men using poor people to kill more poor people of color, so they can get richer, and create more poor people.

Edited to reflect the ethnic balance :P

[12ss1kp]

5. What

do you mean using people of mostly color. Last I heard well over half of the military is white?

[PsychoDad]

6. I stand corrected.

I looked up the numbers, this is all I could find...

Whites are indeed slightly under-represented in today's active-duty military as a whole: They make up 64.2 percent of the force, compared with 69.1 percent of the U.S. population. But whites are slightly over-represented among the dead, at 70.9 percent.

Conversely, African-Americans are notably over-represented in the military as a whole. They make up 19.1 percent of the active-duty force, and a staggering 24 percent of the Army, as opposed to just 12.1 percent of the population. But blacks are not significantly over-represented among the dead of this global war: They make up only 12.4 percent.

The great exception, interestingly, is the Marine Corps, the service with the most aggressive warrior culture. Hispanics are slightly over-represented among living Marines, at 13 percent, and startlingly over-represented among the ones who have died, at 18.6 percent. If the archetypal casualty of this war is a white Army GI, a Hispanic Marine Corps rifleman lies close by his side.

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0504/052804nj1.htm


But I still stand by my assertion that most of our serving servicemen and women represent the poor of this nation.

[0007]

7. Meaning that the color of green money is within reach.

Some bank robbers have been successful also!

[xchrom]

8. uh, that doesn't mean they'll run out of insurgents.

that's the problem with that kind of thinking -- the whole country is against the u.s. occupation -- there are plenty more resistance fighters after this blood bath -- they'll just be somewhere else.
we can't ''win'' this.

[oneighty]

9. An Insurgent is a person

rising in opposition to lawful civil or political authority.

I get it might is right.

We invade Iraq under false pretenses and appoint a puppet government which is then declared to be the lawful government and citizens of such country defending themselves (Patriots one might call them should it happen here) become insurgents.

180

[Bridget Burke]

11. Too bad you aren't there to do your share.

How can you tell an Insurgent from an Iraqi?

[amber dog democrat]

12. In the end it won't accomplish anything

beyond getting lots of poeple killed. We have already lost this war and just don't realize it yet. To me the clock reads Saigon, 1962.

[Tempest]

10. 5,000 insurgents (dubious number), 45,000 civilians in city

This is going to be a war crime.

Worse than anything Saddam had ever done.