The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday, Nov. 9:“War is hell,” said Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The Civil War commander’s terse, unsentimental words are very much on our mind now that the battle for Fallujah, expected to be the most intense combat American soldiers have faced since Vietnam, has been joined.
In the days to come, we will see and hear things that will turn our stomachs and break our hearts.
Many American troops, and many more Iraqi civilians, will die. No one can say what will remain of Fallujah, but it’s likely that the victors and survivors will bear a heavy burden from the desolation of this battle.
The reply of the general, unshakable in his conviction of the rightness of his cause, is worth pondering as American armed forces decide another rebel city’s fate by fire.
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” he wrote, saying that those responsible for the war “deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” He added that “the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home (is) to stop the war.”
The attack by U.S. and Iraqi government forces was caused by insurgents who made the city the capital of Baathist and Islamic terrorist resistance, and who refused to resolve this standoff peacefully.
What is happening in Fallujah is the unavoidable result of their decision to fight those who want a better future for their country.
Fallujah is the home, literally and symbolically, of car bombers, mass murderers, head-hackers and all the forces of evil that must be vanquished if Iraq is to be a stable democracy. Either Fallujah is conquered, or this war is lost.
Fallujah, however, is only one battle. The war will continue.
We take on faith that the Bush administration, mindful of its planning failures thus far in Iraq, has thought through what must come next to secure the nation’s peace. (Gen. Sherman is still hated in Atlanta for scorning those he defeated.)
The sacrifices made by the liberators and the civilians trapped in Fallujah must not have been in vain.
It is the grave responsibility of Bush and his commanders to ensure that the blood now being spilled in that doomed and degraded city will be the seed of a new and hopeful Iraq.

(c) 2004, The Dallas Morning News.

Author