20 YEARS AGO, THE MARINE CORPS’ BATTLE TO SEIZE THE IRAQI CITY OF FALLUJAH FROM INSURGENTS CREATED MODERN URBAN WARFARE TACTICS THAT DEPEND ON PROPAGANDA INSTEAD OF MINIMIZING CIVILIAN CASAULTIES

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The U.S. taught Israel how to kill in Gaza—based on lessons it learned during the Marine’s notorious Battle for Fallujah, Iraq in 2004.

Turn the clock back 20 years. America's long war against so-called "terrorism" was just beginning. To get Congress to legally authorize a war against Iraq and the money to fund it, Pres. George W. Bush lied to lawmakers and the American people. He said Iraq, controlled by a military dictator, Gen. Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Iraq did not. 

News organizations, including the New York Times, amplified the Bush Administration's lies—instead of investigating and debunking them.

Congress authorized the use of force 16 Oct. 2002. The U.S. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom 20 Mar. 2003. Three coalition divisions—two American, one British—made short work of the  Iraqi military. Famously, Marines triumphantly entered Iraq's capital, Baghdad, and pulled down a statue of the Iraqi tyrant in Al-Firdos Square on 8 Apr.—creating an iconic image of liberation. American soldiers were cheered as heroes.

But the honeymoon in Iraq was short-lived. 

Instead of leaving, America stuck around. It claimed it needed to replace the Government it destroyed. Besides, if it didn't, Iraq would become a lawless training ground for "terrorism." It became a live-fire training ground anyway. To many Iraqis, the Americans may have been liberators at first, but they turned themselves into occupiers by staying. That made American soldiers the enemy. 

Saddam's former henchmen and tribal leaders organized a guerilla insurgency. Their militiamen were former members of Hussein's regime and everyday Iraqis who felt an irresistible, patriotic pull to eliminate any possibility of subjugation like that inflicted on their Arab brothers, the Palestinians, by America's closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. Soon foreign fighters flowed into Iraq to join the fight against the U.S.

Fallujah was the insurgency's headquarters. Its center-of-gravity. The nest of proverbial vipers.

The city was never pacified. That may have had something to do with the fact that, five days after the 82d Airborne arrived on Apr. 23, its troopers shot into a crowd of anti-American protesters. They killed 17 and wounded more than 70. When British soldiers fired into a crowd of colonists and killed five in Boston in 1770, five years before the Revolution, anonymous proto-American pamphleteers called it the “Boston Massacre.” After the “Fallujah Massacre,” insurgents started shooting RPGs and AK-47s at American soldiers almost all the time. Improvised Explosive Devices—a fancy, 21st Century word for homemade bombs—became a constant threat.

"Fallujah seemed to be just another obscure Iraqi town when American soldiers rolled into Baghdad," Michael R. Gordon reported for the Times 2 June. "But in the last few weeks it has become a symbol of anti-American resistance."

Nine months later, after killing 23 Iraqi policemen, insurgents ambushed four Blackwater mercenaries who stupidly thought they should go on a Sunday drive through downtown Fallujah. They were captured, killed, burned and dismembered . Insurgents hung their charred remains from a bridge as a warning for American forces to stay out of Fallujah.

“This is Falujah,” members of a mob yelled to cameras, “Who asked you to come here?” Others yelled “Fallujah is the cemetery of America.”

The images of the murdered mercenaries flew around the world in minutes. It was a massive insurgent victory in the information war. Video proof Americans die like everybody else.

By then, Marines were charged with ensuring "peace" and "security" in Fallujah. Gen. Jim Mattis was in command of American forces. 

Gen. Mattis's troops called him "Mad Dog." But Mattis's actual call-sign was "chaos" and he liked to read—especially military history. That made Mattis a very clever general. He could imagine the battle in his head. He would not be drawn into an all-out fight, on the insurgent's home field, at the time of their choosing. Instead, he devised a classic counterinsurgency plan. He would use spies and signals intelligence to identify the specific insurgents responsible—then he would send spooky motherfuckers dressed in black and armed with silenced submachine guns to kill them one-by-one.

"We would respond with raids at the time of our choosing," Mattis wrote in his 2019 memoir, Call Sign Chaos. “I would employ, to quote Napoleon, ‘an iron fist in a velvet glove.’”

"The generals above me agreed with my plan," Mattis revealed in Chaos. "But we were all overruled.”

Pres. Bush ordered them to be "tougher than hell." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought the U.S. had "to send a message that anyone who engaged in acts of terror would face the might of the U.S. military." 

"Our perspective," Mattis wrote of the generals' view, "was lost in the cacophony of intense emotions evoked by the grotesque front-page picture of a mob dancing around dangling corpses."

Looking back in his memoir, Mattis was unsparing in his criticism of Pres. Bush's decision to order the Marines to exact revenge.

"Great nations don't get angry,” Mattis explained. “Military action should be undertaken only to achieve specific strategic effects." 

"A battle inside a city would inflict horrendous damage on noncombatants," he added, and "unify the residents against us."

Pres. Bush’s grave and fundamental mistake was not understanding, or not caring to understand, one of the most basic lessons of 20th Century warfare—learned by the French in Algeria and re-learned by the U.S. in Vietnam. In Iraq, the U.S. was not fighting a conventional war. It was fighting a counter-insurgency. It was a mistake, Mattis said, “trying to treat the problem of Fallujah like a conventional war."

“Insurgent math” doomed conventional war-fighting strategies in counter-insurgencies. The calculus of decisionmaking is different, according to U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Insurgent math means for every one civilian you kill you create 10 new insurgents. For every insurgent you kill, you might create 20 more because “each one you killed has a brother, father, son and friends, who do not necessarily think that they were killed because they were doing something wrong. “

But once Pres. Bush gave the order to attack Fallujah, Gen. Mattis executed. 

Fallujah was shaped like a square, covered 12-square miles and was home to 300,000 people. Its streets were laid out in a basic grid pattern, with over 2,000 total blocks. There were over 50,000 buildings and structures. About 30,000 were homes. Almost all were made of concrete. That made each of them like mini-fortresses. Many had courtyards and walls. There were also half-completed buildings and dilapidated industrial buildings. There were a few wide boulevards but mostly it was narrow streets and even alleyways—blockaded with trash and vehicles and boobytrapped with bombs. 

Mattis's Marines broadcast warnings for civilians to leave, but Pres. Bush's call for immediate action meant many did not have enough time to actually leave. 

Hidden among the civilians that remained was an armed insurgent force of between 600 and 3,000 fighters. They established arms and ammunition caches throughout the city. They chiseled out holes in concrete walls to shoot through. They dug “mouse holes”: trenches and tunnels under houses and walls to facilitate maneuver and escape. They barricaded doors to create dead-end traps. They planted 100s of homemade bombs made from propane bottles, gasoline drums and repurposed military ordinance like artillery shells.

Two Marine battalions—about 2,000 men—attacked 4 Apr. Firing assault rifles and throwing hand grenades, Marines moved house-by-house. Street-by-street. Block-by-block. The fight was three-dimensional, and included rooftops. Marines and insurgents both turned them into observation posts and firing positions. They shot at each other, rooftop-to-rooftop. It was wild.

The video embedded above captured what the fighting in Fallujah was like. The insurgents did not run. They stood and fought. In the video, you can see bright, brief flashes from the building the Marines are shooting at. Those are muzzle flashes from the insurgents' weapons firing back at the Marines. Basically, what you see are the two forces going toe-to-toe at 200 yards.

"They could bloody us, but they could not hold out against the Marine assault," Mattis wrote. By week two, the Marines "had the insurgents in a vice and were squeezing hard." Victory, he said, was in sight.

But then what Mattis described as "insurgent propaganda" took effect that compelled Pres. Bush to order the attack stopped after only five days on 9 Apr. Mattis may have been against assaulting Fallujah in the first place, but once the battle started going soft in the middle of it undermined America's military power. It also undermined Gen. Mattis’s leadership. When you ask someone to risk their life and kill for you they really have to personally believe in the mission and that makes them really, really want to finish the job.

In brief, Mattis was pissed. Famously, he paraphrased Napoleon and responded: "If you're going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna.”

Looking back 15 years later in his memoir, Mattis blamed "Al Jazeera reporters and local stringers for international media sympathetic to the terrorists." 

While the insurgents targeted soldiers, they gave journalists a pass—especially Arab journalists. An Al Jazeera team set up shop in the city hospital, where all they seemingly filmed were dead babies and innocent blood-soaked women with bullet holes and missing body parts.

In Mattis's view, these so-called "journalists" produced fake "'news' from Fallujah, plus video and still pictures." It was "picked up by news bureaus around the globe." The "enemy's propaganda dominated the news cycle." 

Meanwhile, Mattis lamented, the Marines "had no effective response to the propaganda."

Images "of dead babies that would make a rock cry and assertions of agonizing civilian losses caused even our allies to voice strong objections."

About 600 civilians were killed. About half were women and children.  27 Americans and 200 insurgents were also killed.

The insurgents stopped the U.S. military, and won the First Battle of Fallujah.

The U.S. had not fought a large-scale battle in a city since the Battle of Hue during the Vietnam War in 1968. The military's counterinsurgency manual was similarly dated. Thus, generals and military strategists studied the First Battle of Fallujah to glean lessons for future urban battles.  Gen. Mattis, in fact, was ordered to return to the U.S. to help update and rewrite the manual.

Two big lessons that stood out right away were the use of mass artillery fires in support of infantry and information warfare.

Six months later, days after Pres. Bush was elected to a second term as president, he sent the Marines back into Fallujah on 8 Nov. It was the decisive battle of the Iraqi insurgency. This time, the Americans didn’t stop.

Whereas the Marines seemingly used artillery sparingly in the First Battle of Fallujah, they used it liberally in the Second.

"Firing nearly continuously during the assault," according to a Marine Corp report, "artillery fires made a huge contribution to the fight." 

In addition to about 10,000 mortar rounds, Marines fired 5,685 155mm artillery rounds into the city during the battle. They used it to collapse the fort-like concrete houses militants fired from and hid in. They also used artillery to collapse all the houses around them while they sheltered inside one house.

Testimony of unit commanders within the city reveals that Marines would often stage within the safety of certain buildings while artillery support neutralized threats in their immediate vicinity. At the conclusion of the bombardment, the Marines would move forward and continue to clear out the significantly weakened insurgents strongholds. This total use of all firepower available ensured the rapid destruction of the enemy with reduced Marine casualties. 

Still, the fighting was especially fierce. What wasn't destroyed, had to be entered and “cleared.” That meant anyone inside with a gun, and sometimes without, was killed.  

American forces “systematically went house to house, room to room, through thirty thousand buildings," says Bing West, a former Marine-turned-military journalist who wrote the definitive history of the battle, No True Glory. 100 infantry "squads had two hundred firefights inside rooms." There "had never been a battle” like it in history.

The increased use of artillery increased civilian casualties because noncombatants sheltered in targeted buildings too. Artillery is what generals call a "statistical" weapon. That means, it doesn't hit its target all the time. It only hits its intended target some of the time. It hits what it's not supposed to hit all the other times. So you have to fire a lot to hit what you want to kill.

Sometimes entire families and groups of people sheltered together. Given the heavy weapons the U.S. used, most civilians who did not leave hid in basements—their own or others. When an artillery shell, missile or plane-dropped bomb destroyed the house above them, they were killed immediately if they were lucky. If not, they were trapped to die slow. 

Before the U.S. declared victory and ended the Second Battle of Fallujah on 23 Dec., it killed between 581 to 670 civilians, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. It killed another 1,000 to 1,500 alleged insurgents and captured 1,500, the U.S. says. 60% of Fallujah’s buildings were damaged; 20% were destroyed. For the U.S.-led military coalition, it was the bloodiest battle of the entire Second Iraq War: 71 American, 4 British, and 8 Iraqi military personnel were killed. Another 528 were wounded.

Images of about 600 dead Iraqis stopped the First Battle of Fallujah. But, this time, the U.S. had an information warfare strategy integrated into its battle plan to divert public attention from "collateral damage." 

"Successful urban operations also require an effective information operations campaign, and this is a second strategic lesson illustrated by the battle," the American military academy at West Point says. Coalition forces "carefully integrated the information operations campaign into the operational plan, rather than having a separate plan that was bolted on afterward."

In practice, that meant offensive use of atrocity propaganda.

The U.S., West Point says, projected an "extensive media campaign to expose the [alleged] unjustified violence perpetuated by the insurgents against Fallujah’s civilian population before and during the battle." Its "information operations plan convinced both the Iraqi people and international audiences that the coalition was more ethical."

In fact, the U.S. military's information warfare during the Second Battle of Fallujah were so effective it hid an American war crime in plain sight.

Infamously, a Marine murdered an unarmed, captured insurgent in a mosque during the battle on 14 Nov.

The Marine shot the immobile, wounded victim in the head at point-blank range one day after the man was shot by other Marines during a firefight inside the mosque. Instead of evacuating the wounded man to the hospital, they left him there to die—until that other Marine came along and finished the job. When the Marine shoots the prisoner, the video shows his brains splattering the wall behind him.

Journalist Kevin Sites was on assignment for NBC News when he captured the war crime on video. It also went into a pool available to all news organizations around the world. No American television network or news organization broadcast or published the full video. Only overseas news organizations published the full, uncensored video, Sites says.

Since this was before social media, that meant most Americans never saw the full video.

When NBC broke the story, it buried the lede one-third into a blasé report about alleged new dangers American soldiers faced from the allegedly booby-trapped bodies of dead insurgents.

West, the Marine-turned-war reporter, correctly predicted on C-Span in 2005 that the military lessons learned in Fallujah "will be applied to future combat because the demography of the world is such that more than 50% of the world's population now live in cities."

"Fallujah is an example of what's going to happen again," he said, "we just can't predict where."

Where now includes the most densely-populated place on earth: the Gaza Strip.

In the past, Israel openly debated whether massive use of artillery to collapse buildings before sending in infantry troops in Gaza qualifies as a war crime. No longer.

“We are not taking any chances,” Amir Avivi, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division of Israel’s military, told London's Financial Times at the start of Israel's invasion of Gaza in 2023. “When our soldiers are maneuvering we are doing this with massive artillery, with 50 airplanes overhead destroying anything that moves.”

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