Digging In For A Fight

JOHN MOORE/AP
FRONTLINE: Marines laying siege to Fallujah are briefed by their commander

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--THE FALLUJAH DILEMMA
Even if you have all the troops in the world, it may not do any good against an enemy that's firing on you from inside ambulances and using children as human shields. Nowhere is the challenge of how to win the battle without losing the war as painfully visible as it is in Fallujah, where the Marines' siege entered its fourth week with both hopes for a resolution and fear of a bloodbath. The city of 200,000, 35 miles west of Baghdad, is the war's open sore. A Sunni stronghold, it has festered since the start of the occupation, when U.S. forces faced with a crowd of anti-American demonstrators killed 17 civilians. Since then, about half a dozen different military outfits have had responsibility for keeping order, which has made it hard for soldiers to build relationships with any local Iraqis not allied with the die-hard Saddam loyalists and foreign jihadists who set up shop in the city.

Many officers maintained that Fallujah had to be taken on eventually, and the ambush and mutilation of four U.S. security contractors in the city in March set the stage. The U.S. vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Marines surrounded the city, imposed a curfew and engaged in a pitched battle with what the White House now says could be as many as "a few thousand" insurgents. Hopes for a peaceful resolution fluttered when Iraqi civic leaders helped broker a cease-fire: if the insurgents would surrender their heavy weapons, the Marines would pull back from their cordon. The U.S. even offered to let Iraqi officers from Fallujah lead patrols there.

But Lieut. General James T. Conway, the Marines' top commander in Iraq, has not been impressed by the weapons turned in so farthe first truckload last week was a rusty junk bin of antique arms and warned that an all-out assault would follow if the rebels did not comply. A showdown, he said, would come in "days, not weeks." Some former Pentagon officials are worried about the signal that deadline sent. "We've got to stop this business of getting up in front of the world and saying, 'We are going to do this in Fallujah,' and then we seem to back off the next day," says former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni. "In that part of the world, strength is respected greatly, and if you look weak, you're in trouble."

There was good reason for the Americans' hesitation: the prospect of a full assault on the city was having repercussions across the country, where moderate Iraqis were watching Arab TV stations that claimed there had already been hundreds of civilian casualties in Fallujah. At Friday prayers in Baghdad, at least one prominent Sunni cleric called for an uprising in the Sunni areas if Fallujah was attacked.

--THE POLITICAL FALLOUT
The Pentagon can handle its immediate needs by delaying the rotations of soldiers who were supposed to be home by now and sending back to Iraq ahead of schedule those who have already gone home. But the admission that in the end more troops may be needed for a longer time than anyone had planned put some basic military issues on the table. Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel raised the possibility that a volunteer military may not be sufficient going forward. Pentagon officials remain opposed to restoring the draft, abolished in 1973, confident that an older and more experienced enlisted force performs better than younger, revolving-door draftees. "I don't know anyone in the Executive Branch of the government who believes that it would be appropriate or necessary to reinstitute the draft," Rumsfeld said. Churning military manpower through a draft, he has long argued, yields less experienced soldiers at a higher cost.

For now, Pentagon officials say they are still meeting their manpower targets. In the Army Reserve, for instance, a 7% shortfall in re-enlistments was offset by an excess of new recruits. Still, the demands on soldiers and their families are being felt in communities all across the country, and members of Congress were hearing about it from their constituents during recess. "Iraq was the No. 1 issue on people's minds," says Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins. Her state has the third highest rate of deployed National Guard members and reserves in the country. One reserve unit, the 94th Military Police Company, has been deployed overseas on active duty for 2 1/2 of the past four years. The reservists were finally scheduled to come home on Easter weekend, but their tour was extended three months. "To make matters worse," Collins says, "they literally were on a bus on their way to the plane that was going to take them back to the U.S." when orders came to turn around and return to their base camp. "This war feels very close and very personal to those of us in Maine," she says. "It doesn't feel distant."