NYT,p1,lead: Falluja Pullout Left Haven of Insurgents ("terrorist hotbed")

[DeepModem Mom]

This article quotes Abu Karim Barias, the governor of Anbar Province, which includes Falluja, asked to describe the situation in Falluja: "It's simple. It's a terrorist hotbed." Such is our accomplishment in Iraq. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq's director of national intelligence, is also quoted: "We could take the city, but we would have to kill everyone in it."

INSURGENTS
Falluja Pullout Left Haven of Insurgents, Officials Say
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: July 8, 2004

AMP FALLUJA, Iraq, July 6 - American and Iraqi officials say that a decision in April to pull back American forces from Falluja inadvertently created a safe haven for terrorists and insurgents there. But officials are reluctant to send American troops back into the city for fear of touching off another uprising.

The officials say they are unsure how to proceed, but agree they merely postponed the problem when the Americans halted an attack in April, brokering a deal to keep Americans out of Falluja and allow local Iraqis to police the city instead.

Iraqi and American officials say they would prefer to re-enter the city with a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers, perhaps backed up by Americans. But they concede that an Iraqi force capable of mounting an effective assault on Falluja, a city of 250,000 people, is months or even years away.

As a result, the Americans and the new Iraqi government are faced with a growing danger that - as long as they adhere to the agreement to stay out of the city - they are nearly powerless to confront....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/international/middleeast/08fall.html

[Wright Patman]

1. I found the two grafs below

on Page 2 of the article to be a fairly explicit denunciation of the commander-and-chimp. Apparently, as I only suspected at the time, it was * personally who ordered the civilian massacres because he was so enraged at the Blackwater mercenaries being strung up.

What we have here is * deciding on genocide of the city of Falluja and then being struck with 'genocidus interruptus' when political reaction in the rest of Iraq and the Arab world generally became untenable.

"We didn't ask to go into the city, and we didn't ask to stop offensive operations," said a senior American officer involved in the campaign. "If we had not been told to stop, in three to five days we would have owned the city."

Both decisions were made by the political leadership in the United States, he said, but "you tell your force to do one thing, and then another - it has a cost."

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Great find, WP -- "Decisions were made by POLITICAL leadership in US..."