US Ignorance Created the Quagmire in Fallujah
Journalist Hazim al-Amin reports in al-Hayat that Fallujah and Ramadi strike him as almost identical in most ways. The same extended clan networks dominate both cities, both are Sunni, etc. Yet Ramadi hasn’t given the US nearly as much trouble as Fallujah. He thinks the difference is that the US military was simply ignorant and went about incurring clan feuds by its actions in Fallujah, but happened to do better in Ramadi. This approach strikes me as more likely correct than US VP Dick Cheney’s fixation on al-Qaeda as the root of all Iraq’s problems. (I kid you not, he actually implies this. The US still has not one al-Qaeda operative in custody in Iraq, despite thousands of arrests).