Iraq War: Who's on Fallujah?

Or, more precisely, as DHinMI at Daily Kos asks: "So who ... is in charge of Fallujah?"

I won't try to recap what he says so well there.  I don't quite know what to make of this.  According to some reports, local commanders at Fallujah worked out a deal to settle the standoff without the knowledge and approval of the Pentagon in Washington.  Which seems pretty surprising in light of the earlier reports from a week ago that Bush himself was making the decisions on what to do about Fallujah.

My own guess is that the deal was approved at the top (Bush and Rummy), but to deflect the entirely predictable criticism from the blowhard Republican Right, they decided to minimize the role of senior officials.

All of which makes for a very bizarre story.  And as DHinMi points out, there seems to be some question of exactly who is in charge of Fallujah.  It's always tempting to look for elaborate, Machiavellian calculations behind things like this.  And in Karl Rove's White House, there seems to be no shortage of those.  But we shouldn't forget the role of just plain incompetence in some of these things.

To quote John Kenneth Galbraith again, in his comments on what he called "the stupidity problem" in the runup to the First World War in The Age of Uncertainty (1977), he said:

There was a final consideration, one that it is always thought a trifle pretentious to stress.  Rulers in Germany and Eastern Europe, generals in all countries, held their jobs by right of family and tradition.  If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.  Nor is its absence likely to be a disqualification.  On the contrary, intelligence is a threat to those who do not possess it, and there is a strong case, therefore, for excluding those who do possess it.  This was the tendency in 1914.  In consequence, both the rulers and the generals in World War I were singularly brainless men.

None was capable of thought on what war would mean for his class - for the social order that was so greatly in his favor.  There had always been wars.  Rulers had been obliterated.  The ruling classes had always survived.  To the extent that there was thought on the social consequences of war, that was what was believed.

In a strongly dynastic-minded family like the House of Bush, such considerations weigh more heavily than we perhaps are accustomed to think.

Whatever the precise nature of the settlement in Fallujah, I'm inclined to think that Bob Dreyfuss is more right than wrong in Victory in Fallujah 04/30/04 TomPaine.com:

[Victory] For the resistance, that is. There's no sugar-coating the fact that the Bush administration has suffered a major, public defeat in Fallujah. The United States looked the insurgents in the eye there—and blinked. Instead of flattening Fallujah if the insurgents didn't hand over heavy weapons and stop fighting, U.S. forces have meekly retreated, under cover of a plan that would put some of the same insurgents on the U.S. payroll.

     It's a total loss for the neocon strategy of dominating Iraq, and a total win for, well, the Iraqis. Not the ones on the Iraqi Governing Clowncil, but the real ones, the ones opposed to the U.S. occupation. Not only is the United States retreating from the showdown in Fallujah, but it's reportedly going to allow a Saddam-era general to command a force inside the city. ...

The fact is, any Iraqi opposed to the American occupation now knows that the United States can be fought to a standoff. Not only does the Fallujah settlement, if it stands, signal the beginning of the end of the U.S. presence in Iraq, it is a massive defeat for the neocons and their allies. The policy of de-Baathification—linked to Ahmad Chalabi and Co.—is over, as Baath-era generals will be taking over the Iraqi army. The UN plan led by Algeria's Lakhdar Brahimi—who apparently intends to install a transitional government of technocrats (meanwhile consigning Chalabi to the trash heap)—is moving fast.

Dreyfuss is inclined to accept the claim that local commanders worked out the deal without the guidance or immediate consent of Washington.  I'm remaining agnostic on that point for the moment.  But, blunt though he may be, I believe he's right in his analysis.  Ahmed Chalabi and his supporters are still very much part of the scene, though.  We haven't heard the last of him.