Fight to Finish This Time?

For weeks, Marines have paced like chained bulldogs on the outskirts of the Iraqi city of Fallouja, lunging and growling but restrained from going in.

On Thursday, the U.S. and Iraqis sent these forces to conduct raids inside this bastion of Sunni violence, while Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, warned that unless insurgents turn over a notorious terrorist the Marines and Iraqi troops will storm in and take control once and for all.

The last time Marines marched into Fallouja, they were promptly ordered to do something that runs counter to their creed: pull back short of the goal. That was a mistake. But the decision-makers this time have apparently learned.

It was on March 31 that a gleeful mob killed four civilian American contractors and mutilated their bodies in Fallouja. President Bush ordered Marines to take the city. On foot, they seized block after block, losing six Marines in the fight.

Although U.S. forces had refrained from unleashing their artillery, the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera made the attack look as if it were destroying the city. On April 9, Allawi, Ghazi Ajil Yawer, a Sunni Muslim and tribal leader, and other Iraqi politicians persuaded L. Paul Bremer III, then the U.S. administrative chief in Iraq, to declare a cease-fire.

The Marines objected. Like Rome’s legions, Marines are feared because they never turn back. They figured they were two days from finishing the fight. The White House overruled them.

With CIA assistance, the Marines accepted an offer from former Iraqi generals and let an all-Iraqi brigade of insurgents and former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime into the city, with the agreement that they would eject all foreign fighters and turn over any heavy weapons. In exchange, the Marines had to stay out of Fallouja.

Over the next several months, the jihadists metastasized unchecked. Former members of the old regime, the terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi and radical mullahs turned the city into the bloody lair of kidnappers and suicide bombers, imposed a Taliban-like rule and hacked the heads off Americans, Britons, Koreans and Iraqis, often as videotape rolled.

Last week, after U.S. and Iraqi forces seized the city of Samarra from insurgents, the Fallouja rebels decided to cut a deal.

On Oct. 8, Yawer, now Iraq’s interim president, declared that the insurgents were on the verge of agreeing again, as they had in April, to eject foreign fighters, turn over heavy weapons and accept the Iraqi national guard -- if, once again, officials in Baghdad guaranteed that Americans would not attack the city.

Two competing theories attempt to explain this deja vu offer of a deal.

The first sees it as a classic insurgent ploy: Attack when strong, and stall by negotiations when weak. Thirty-five years ago, Hanoi played its weak hand brilliantly, and Fallouja is showing equal verve for the approach. In April, the insurgents’ bluff was that the Marines would have to kill them all, creating a mess that would rattle global Islam. Never mind that the actual destruction was light by historical comparison; Al Jazeera provided grisly close-ups to suggest otherwise.

Now the insurgents, one of whose key negotiators was a ringleader in the August beheading of an Iraqi national guard battalion commander in Fallouja, were using the same technique. We’re too tough to take without a fight, they were telling Yawer and Allawi, but if you keep out the Americans, we’ll let you send in the Iraqi national guard.

That’s a terrific deal for the insurgents, who have proved that they don’t need heavy weapons or foreign fighters to co-opt, intimidate and slaughter any Iraqi security force sent into the city without American troops.

The second and more benign theory is that the insurgents want only to throw out the American infidel invader, and that once the Baghdad government allows that to happen, Fallouja -- called “the bomb factory” by our troops -- will be peaceful.

According to this theory, the city’s disenfranchised Sunnis, Wahhabists, Baathists and terrorists hold no agendas inherently inimical to democracy.

Before President Yawer buys this theory, he should require the insurgents to sign a loyalty oath and publish it. If the insurgents intend to be good citizens, this should not be an affront to them.

Yawer has said he will not countenance unnecessary violence by the U.S. military -- “Each drop of Iraqi blood is dear to us.” He has said that the city should not be “punished” for the transgressions of a few. This is like saying in 1943 that Berlin should not be “punished.”

For the last five months, Allawi has insisted that he can woo former Baathists away from the insurgency. This has yet to happen.

A cynic might infer that the Iraqi interim government has calculated that it risks nothing by trying another “peace settlement.”

This time, however, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld did not repeat the mistakes of April, when he left negotiations to the regular military and diplomatic chains of command.

Instead, on Tuesday he flew to Baghdad. Prime Minister Allawi then told the Fallouja delegation to hand over Zarqawi. Predictably, they refused. Rumsfeld and Allawi had called their bluff. That’s when the Marines launched their heavy raid against Fallouja, despite Yawer’s wearying complaints about the use of force.

Today, Iraq’s leaders face a choice: to condone or to excise the insurgent sanctuary in this city just 25 miles from Baghdad.

The interim leaders must know that if they agree that U.S. soldiers cannot enter the city, Al Jazeera may well portray Fallouja to the Arab world as the symbol of a truly free Iraq -- the city-state that emerged as the Sparta of the Middle East by throwing out the Americans who came to liberate the country. This would be a bizarre twist in a bizarre battle.

We don’t know how this is going to end. Fallouja may again outfox Baghdad. By the time you read this, Zarqawi may be gone. One thing, though, is clear: The longer the Marines are kept from taking control of Fallouja, the longer Zarqawi is allowed to run free, the more Iraqis and Americans will be blown to bits.