On December 23, 2005 Secretary Rumsfeld held a townhall meeting on the topic of Fallujah.
At that meeting, Rumsfeld stated the following:
But what we’re in is a global war on terror. It is a struggle in the Muslim religion between a small number of violent extremists who are determined to behead people and kill people and force the world to see things the way they see things, to try to reestablish a caliphate in the world, to overthrow moderate Muslim nations, to attack Western values and Western behavior and Western culture. They’re a small minority. The overwhelming numbers of people in that religion are moderate and they aren’t extremist and they aren’t terrorists.
Surprising to me, then, when I read today’s article by John Burns of the NYT, “Getting Used to War as Hell”: The U.S. used “crushing tactics”
in an aborted offensive in April and then decisively in November, when they regained control of Falluja, an insurgent stronghold. In that eight-day battle, a Marine-led force of about 10,000 Americans destroyed much of the city, including, according to the city’s compensation commissioner, about 36,000 of its 50,000 homes.
[Emphasis added].
Until reading today’s article by John Burns, I had no idea that our military had destroyed so much of Falluja. No wonder so many Iraqis hated the U.S, even prior to the U.S. massacre of Iraqi citizens in Haditha. Back in Falluja, a “small minority” of “terrorists” allegedly justified our destruction of 72% of the homes. Even more conservative estimates of the Falluja destruction are ghastly. Was this another U.S. decision to blow things up to save them?
Or was this another application of faith-based mathematics, the same type of math used regarding the constuction of a billion dollar U.S. embassy in Bagdad, our mega-monument to Iraqi “sovereignty”?
