On May 1, 2003, US President George Bush, gamely sporting a flight suit aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, proudly declared victory in Iraq over the apparently vanquished Iraqi Republican Guard. It cannot be without intentional irony that soldiers of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, after having laid siege to Falluja, Iraq for nearly a month, chose that day, exactly one year later, to announce their surrender of Falluja to the not-so-defeated-after-all Iraqi Republican Guard.

The stunning surrender by the marines was not reported as such. Instead, Western media chose to portray the retreat the way the Pentagon wished it portrayed: a strategic re-deployment to make room for a battalion of Iraqis to go into Falluja and wrest control of it from rebels there, before the marines would be forced to go in themselves and endanger the lives of civilians in doing so.

But the images from the morning of May 1 tell a far different story. Salah Abboud al-Jabouri, a former governor of the surrounding province under Saddam Hussein, and commander of Iraqi forces there before the fall of the Baathists, was seen climbing out of the back of his personal shaded-glass Mercedes limousine that he traveled from Baghdad to Falluja in , to shake hands with the marines' commander and survey the situation-and take control of it.

The battalion he commands is, by the admission of US marines, stocked with the same fighters who resisted the siege of Falluja the previous month. Video clips from inside Falluja that day showed fighters in the backs of Toyota pick-up trucks with guns raised in triumph, and ecstatic residents of Falluja cheering them on. Could they have been reacting like that to news of a strategic redeployment of US marines?

Initial news of the surrender apparently caught not only members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council by surprise, but also commanders of other forces in the US-led coalition as well. Most alarmingly, it appears as though even the Pentagon was not aware of the arrangement at Falluja in which power was handed over from the marines to the Iraqis.

That American forces should by now begin to think about pulling back is no surprise. Even Anthony Cordesman, who holds the chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a very prominent Washington think tank, pronounced the week before that in his best estimation, no military solutions exist in Iraq (none without causing intolerable numbers of deaths among Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, that is). Cordesman said that, despite Bush's instructions to stay the course, the American forces may not be able to. "This is an extremely uncertain struggle," Cordesman patiently explained.

He is not alone among prominent strategists in Washington who now find great fault with the planning prior to the launching of war in Iraq. Americans in the field also say the same thing. A military spokesman last week said to media that it now appeared to him to have been a well-thought-out strategy by Iraq's Republican Guard to fall back during the US invasion, and then to encircle and trap them once they had set up and populate d their bases deep in the country.

Donald Rumsfeld, a civilian, has become famous for his micromanagement of US military tactics in the field in his capacity as Secretary of Defense. His memos to all levels of command have frequently (and anonymously) been referred to by field commanders as "extremely annoying."

Also, they're dangerous: it was apparently Rumsfeld's call for marines to attack Falluja in early April, an attack that was repelled by insurgents within, setting the stage for the subsequent siege of Falluja and the tit-for-tat ultimatums leading up to the marines' surrender.

It was in the midst of that siege, at a time when it appeared that US forces would storm back into the city, that Bush conducted a press conference, only his 11 th in his 27 months as president. Though a great deal of anxiety coursed through American minds as well as minds around the world, the message Bush delivered to the American public, and to the American forces in the field, was that he had every intention of "staying the course."

The marines proved themselves not quite so stupid: without authority from Rumsfeld's Pentagon or Bush's White House, they unilaterally arranged for the safe passage of the commander of Iraqi forces in Falluja in order to surrender the city to him. They also released that day from prison the most prominent Imam from Falluja to earn better conditions of their surrender.

An uncorroborated report that day said that all American bases had taken down their American flags, suggesting the surrender was more widespread than only among the marines besieging Falluja. If that was the case, it would suggest the US military had fallen entirely out of civilian, and White House, control , and was presenting a nearly complete surrender.

However, in the days that followed, Salah had been replaced by another Iraqi commander and the Pentagon and White House were talking again of taking the city if conditions (much lessened) were not met. If there had been a collapse of civilian control over the US military in the beginning of this month, it seems to have been restored quickly again, if perhaps only in appearances.

It was, by the by, in the midst of this grand confusion, at the moment when it was unclear whether or not a military rebellion was under way, when four-month-old photographs appeared in the media depicting members of that same military humiliating, degrading, and torturing their Iraqi prisoners. Co-incidence? Perhaps. But the furor surrounding the content of those pictures quickly moved off the opinion pages of all newspapers any speculations about what really happened at Falluja, and what state the general military deployment to Iraq is currently in.

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http://www.1rev.net/archive/88-repub/88_potvin_marines.htm

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