News came in this weekend that Al Qaeda, or more accurately a group of some foreigners which claimed affiliation with Al Qaeda, had "taken" Fallujah, a smallish city just to the West of Baghdad, in Iraq.

Not a few of us, myself included, feel a little bit wrong about this. Accordingly, I am spending some time to try and sort it out.

Why did we go and fight twice in that town? It's a pissant little place, actually. About half the size of Akron, Ohio. Why did we go there and shed so much blood and treasure? Then it came to me, we fought there because that is where the fighting was … and that was dumb of us, of me.

See, we made the mistake that this Al Qaeda element is making now. We thought that the place was important. It is not now, and, sadly, it was not then. And stupid me, I only just got it. All it took was the morons of Al Qaeda to let me see how dumb I was back when I was in Iraq in 2005.

Fallujah is a pretty unique place.

As I said, it is on the small side, about 210,000 people, but they are clustered pretty tight and up against a river. Remember what I said, just a few days ago in a different context, about different histories leading to different population distributions? The same thing applies here. Fallujah is dense, but small, because of that density. And being set in the desert as it is, there are really only a couple of ways in and out of the city, which pretty much dooms the Al Qaeda idiots who "took" the city on Saturday to a fairly rapid death. And we don't have to lift a finger this time.

Back in 2005, we were obsessed with making sure the Iraqi military and paramilitary forces were "balanced." Oh, how stupid I was. How dumb we were. We who were planning and creating the Iraqi military and police tried to make them in our own image. We never realized, back then, that in a nation that will not be ethnically or religiously de-segregated for at least some centuries to come, there might at some point be a need for segregated forces.

Some of our efforts back then made sense. We reined in, where we could, the excesses. But in hindsight, it was the Iraqis who knew the score. And so let me tell you, if you are watching the news, what is going to happen.

The Iraqis, the Army and the paramilitary "Special Police," with select units, are going to Fallujah, and they are going to utterly crush the Al Qaeda elements there. These "select units" will have some Shia members, but I would bet my bottom dollar that most, if not all, of the officers are Sunni, and a lot of them from Al Anbar province. There they will link up with the Sunni local leaders -- call them Sheiks if you want -- but they're just like we have in any small American town, the oldsters who have been there forever. They're the ones who run the high school booster program and the yearly pancake breakfast to raise money for the volunteer fire department. You know them, just as I do. They are the same in every small American town. The same thing applies in Iraq.

And when the Army links up with the local sheiks they will know, almost perfectly, exactly where every one of the Al Qaeda foreigners are located. Then there will be a shudder of violence, and perhaps a few dozen of the local boys who "went astray" will take a sudden vacation to visit relatives out of town, and voila, the city is back under nominal government control again.

I am guessing that it will take all of about 96 hours or so.

Chalk up another one for Al Qaeda stupidity.

The opinions here are those of the author and do not represent the DoD, the US Army, or any unit. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.

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