What We Won in Fallouja

Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.

The Duke of Wellington

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The news media are taking Wellington's dictum to heart. They seem positively despondent over the battle of Fallouja.

It is right and proper to mourn the death of 71 Americans and the wounding of hundreds more. As Wellington realized, martial glory rings hollow when weighed against the cost in blood. But it is wrong to rush to the opposite extreme by assuming, as so much of the current commentary implicitly does, that war solves nothing and that all casualties are meaningless. In fact, many of the turning points of history have been battles, such as Wellington's victory at Waterloo, which ended for all time the threat of French expansionism in Europe.

Obviously the battle of Fallouja was not be as decisive as Waterloo; few battles are. But that shouldn't blind us to the accomplishments of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which led the offensive along with U.S. Army and Iraqi soldiers.

Coalition troops killed 1,200 to 1,600 guerrillas and captured more than 1,000. They uncovered 26 bomb factories, 350 arms caches (containing thousands of weapons), several chemical weapons laboratories and eight houses where hostages were held and probably tortured and killed. And they accomplished all this with less than half the number of casualties suffered in Hue, Vietnam, in 1968, the last major urban assault mounted by the Marine Corps.

As significant as what happened is what didn't happen. The second battle of Fallouja did not turn into a public relations debacle, as did the attack in April. The Marines cleverly began this campaign by occupying the main hospital in Fallouja, which, in the spring, had been the source of inflated claims about civilian casualties. There was no uprising in the streets of Najaf or Karbala -- or Cairo or Amman -- to protest the second assault on Fallouja. The Iraqi interim government held together behind the fierce determination of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to fight the terrorists.

The only major PR snafu came when a journalist taped a Marine shooting a wounded insurgent. Though endlessly replayed on Al Jazeera (which refused to show the video of terrorists apparently slaughtering aid worker Margaret Hassan), there is no sign that this action has cost the U.S. any public support in Iraq. On the contrary, many Iraqis, fed up with terrorist attacks, no doubt applauded the Marine's ruthlessness.