The coming battle

The upside of publicly announcing the impending assault on Fallujah is that it gives civilians fair warning to get out while they can. Here's the downside. Look for the insurgents to get even more violent in anticipation and fear of the U.S. military hammering them.

This war has been far bloodier than any of our Pentagon war planners expected, and the justification for it seems to change week by week, but now that we're committed, we must defeat our opponents and then continue trying to establish peace in Iraq. There's no other option at this point.

Here's hoping three things:

1) We take no casualties (or, realistically, as few as possible).
2) No civilians die (or, realistically, as few as possible).
3) Every insurgent who's trying to kill our troops is defeated (no qualifier here).