David Warren has a depressing column on Fallujah, and how our own media undermines our efforts.

…we come to the next stage of an unpleasant proposition. In its selective use of explosive imagery, the media have a power equivalent to that which the terrorists have in the selective use of explosive devices. There is an overlapping agenda, too: for the great majority of both terrorists and journalists consider the Bush administration to be their principal adversary. (On the other hand, they differ on the need for the imposition of Sharia law.)

But the bottom line remains:

In its recent experience in Iraq and elsewhere, the U.S. is finding what the Israelis have long since not wanted to know. Michael Oren is an Israeli veteran, and the brilliant author of the definitive history of the Six Day War. When I had coffee with him, recently, he said: “If you strike back, you will encourage terrorism. And if you don’t strike back, you will encourage terrorism.”

You let them walk over you, or you fight. It’s true that fighting makes them even angrier, but it helps to wipe them out.

In the face of such graphic images, it’s easy to forget that much of Iraq is now at peace, with prospects for future prosperity and freedom increasing daily.

Fallujah is the last stand of the Ba’athist regime, with a significant population of those who benefited from it at the expense of most, and who remain unwilling to yield their power. It is, in fact, a microcosm of what all of Iraq was a year ago, before the liberation. It is a gang of brutal thugs, holding hostage a majority of the populace within it, living in an unreality like Saddam’s–the notion that bluster, brutality, deceit and murder will somehow fend off the Americans. As they will find out shortly, it is they, not we, who are fighting the last war, having learned too well the false lesson of Mogadishu.

We are paying the price now for not conquering it when we went in last March.

As many (including me, and more eloquently, David Warren) pointed out at the time, last year’s military activities were less a war than the ending and resolution of a massive hostage situation, the removal of a gang of criminals that had gained sway over the territory of Iraq, maintaining their power by terrorizing its inhabitants.

Their territory, the so-called Sunni Triangle, has now been reduced to a very small portion of that original area, and what we did to the tyranny of Iraq at large then we must do to the thankfully much smaller one in Fallujah now. Like then, it will have to be done as precisely as possible, with as little damage to innocents and infrastructure as possible, but it must be done, and I think it will.

[Update]

They think they’ve identified at least some of the perps. And note this:

…they included former members of Iraq’s paramilitary forces and “non-Iraqi Arabs.”

Flypaper’s still working. More that we can kill there instead of having to defend against them here.