Decline and Fall

I was reminded of this story when I read the back-and-forth about Michael Totten's and Ali al-Fadhily's divergent accounts of life in Fallujah these days. See commentary here, here, here, here and here.

Totten and al-Fadhily are both right in their own ways: from the Marines' perspective, Fallujah's a hell of a lot better than it was last year at this time, because they aren't getting shot at. That does tend to improve your outlook. From the Iraqi citizens' perspective, they don't have freedom of movement in their own city, and all those barricades can't help but make it more difficult to get supplies. Totten apparently only talked to U.S. sources and al-Fadhily only talked to Iraqi sources, so therein lies the root of the argument.

But there are times when Totten seems to be talking about another place entirely. Take, for instance, his argument against al-Fadhily's claim that 70% of Fallujah was destroyed in 2004:

He claims seventy percent of the city was destroyed during Operation Phantom Fury, also known as Al-Fajr, in November 2004. This is a lie. If he really went to Fallujah himself, he knows it's a lie. It's possible that as much as seventy percent of the city was damaged, if a single bullet hole in the side of a house counts as damage. I really don't know. It's hard to say. But I saw much more destruction in nearby Ramadi than I saw in Fallujah. Even there the percentage of the city that was actually destroyed is in the low single digits – nowhere near seventy percent. And I spent triple the amount of time in Fallujah as in Ramadi. I didn't personally see every street or house, but I followed the Marines on foot patrols every day and never once retraced my steps.

I guess he was in a different city than I'm in, because there is no possible way anyone could look at Fallujah today and say that the percentage of destruction is below "the low single digits." I'm just outside of Fallujah now, and I go into the city semi-regularly. The rubble is everywhere. The shells of buildings are everywhere. Walls are crumbling, roofs have caved in, pieces of what used to be peoples' homes lie about in empty lots. It looks about like you would expect a city to look like after it had been bombarded at length by the largest, most powerful military in human history. Whether the extent of the damage is 70% or 50% or 20% (what are the criteria for such estimates anyway?), it's a far cry from 1%-4%. There's no way Totten could have been off by that much if he weren't looking through rose-tinted glasses. (Speaking of rose-tinted glasses, check out this commenter's ramblings at Commentary: "Operation Iraqi Freedom comes closer to perfection than any major conflict in modern history." You can't make this stuff up.)

Having said that, 70% seems a bit much. But again, I have no idea how one would compute this sort of thing. Is a building that is half-missing only 50% destroyed? I have no idea. I do get the sense that neither Totten nor al-Fadhily is a completely trustworthy source.

My take is that things aren't as dire as al-Fadhily says they are, nor are they as rosy as Totten says. But that's right now. This whole Anbar Awakening thing is hanging by a thread. One flare-up could cause the sheikhs who are currently working with U.S. forces to reverse their course and decide that we're not their friends anymore. Which makes the current situation in Fallujah neither good nor bad, but merely contingent. And it's contingent on the main thing that isn't happening in Iraq actually happening: a political solution to the ethnic and sectarian violence that has plagued this country ever since we unleashed it.